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Facebook Estimates Around 10% of Accounts Are Fake
An anonymous reader writes "Last week, during its fourth-quarter earnings report, Facebook revealed it had 1.23 billion monthly active users, 757 million daily active users, 945 million monthly active mobile users, and 556 million daily active mobile users. In its 10-K filing published on the weekend, the company estimated that in 2013, between 5.5 percent and 11.2 percent of these users were fake."
Another anonymous reader sent in a link to a recent interview where Mark Zuckerberg appears more pragmatic in his opinions about forcing real identities online: "Former Facebook employees say identity and anonymity have always been topics of heated debate in the company. Now Zuckerberg seems eager to relax his old orthodoxies. 'I don’t know if the balance has swung too far, but I definitely think we’re at the point where we don’t need to keep on only doing real identity things,' he says. 'If you’re always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden.'"
In reality, it's more like 50%.
I have a fake account for testing. It would be much simpler if they made testing as simple as companies like Stripe. Until then... fake accounts.
Now Zuckerberg seems eager to relax his old orthodoxies
Of course he does - if 10% are fake then he wants that 10% included in his figures, not excluded.
At this point, they will get to your name in any case. They have accumulated such a massive data base that they will identify you in a number of other ways. Your real name will eventually leak to them through your friends or because they match it with your name.surname@gmail.com address, or mining your company's staff page, or because you pay something with your credit card, etc... Plus a ton of other things.
Just because you don't have your real name there it does not mean they don't know who you are. It might help gainst other parties data mining/stalking you, though.
Yeah sometimes its necessary. A friend of mine has been stalked by a Neo Nazi gang for some time after she spoke out somewhere about racism. Death threats, and so on (Neo nazis are one of the nastiest organized crime things I've ever seen!). She has *very good* reason to want to be anonymous and use a fake name on facebook only known to family and close friends.
Its *dangerous* to force real identities on people.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
He has only relaxed his desire for id because the meta inferences he and the company can make are actually better then trusting people to type their real names.
I do not use facebook anymore!
If I put up a Facebook page for my cat, is that considered a fake account? No fake identities have been used, though perhaps the T&S require all users to be human.
What about people who have two FB profiles - eg one filled with gaming apps and all the crap that comes along with it, and the other for socialising?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Does this mean that 10% of my friends aren't really my friends?
A lot of so-called "fake" accounts were created because FB is way too pervy, wanting to know enough information about you that they can sell it to content aggregators.
So one creates "fake" accounts with no real phone number attached and a generic image to stop FB from being too NSA.
Maybe they should back off. Everyone is leaving fast because their perv-quotient is way too high.
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If Zuckerberg is publically acknowledging 10% then you can be sure it's a lot higher than that. I'd peg it at closer to 25%. But that's not the real issue. The real issue is that, due to FB's policies, legitimate users feel compelled to put in fake names, birthdates, locations, schools, employers, etc. Why? Because of FB's continued and well documented history of deceptive security practices. You cannot trust them and it's one of the main reasons I don't use facebook.
In short, the users don't want to give up their accounts entirely (although I'm sure many have) but remain there with a fake identity. So the question then becomes: for a company like FB where almost 100% of their revenue comes from advertising how effective is it when you are advertising to zombie accounts?
"between 5.5 percent and 11.2 percent of these users were fake."
I assume they are just counting the entire Los Angeles population right? ;-)
Too many sites are converting to Facebook for comments, so I participate with my fake account.
They'll use 11.2% when valuating their user base to dodge as much tax as possible and 5.5% to push up the price they charge advertisers.
I'm a 104 year old man born in Antarctica currently residing in the North Sentinel Islands. I graduated from Columbine High School at the age of 1 and went to Miskatonic University in Arkham Massachusetts.
Half of all comments on any given status by a celebrity or famous page will be "I work from home and make millions!"
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
Facebook counts the profiles of persons no longer on the planet, people that have created a page and not been there since, and people that have tried to "quit" their site for as long as I can remember. When people want something to look a certain way, they hire statisticians to make it look that way.
There was a report last year that Facebook had 1.2 billion people signed on, which is laughable. The largest populations in the world (India and China) do not have a majority that can use the internet, hundreds of millions in other countries are banned from this (most of Africa and the Middle East), and other people just don't give a shit (majority of Eastern Europe).
I'm pretty sure another report near the same time claimed that 50% of the accounts on FB were not people at all. Some of that 50% were companies, and a big chunk went to sock puppets, trolls, and scams.
I'm guessing that is why FB decided to try and make themselves look "good", but people are still going to leave. If you are not a security minded old codger like me, FB is no longer "hip" and "cool".
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
(Posted anonymously to protect my male identity.)
I'm a transgendered individual, and I maintain my original Facebook profile in my real name, and a separate Facebook profile in my femme name. The two profiles are not connected. I use neither of them for troll or spam purposes, but merely to reflect the two different halves of "me," and I don't consider either one to be "fake." I've little doubt, however, that Facebook would think of my femme profile as "fake," though it's backed with real friends, real photos, and mostly-valid personal data that I've entered, albeit with a gender of "female."
If Facebook is really considering relaxing being so fussy about "real identities," it can only help me and others like me.
Other than someone involved with marketing/sales or social media/web related, what job requires a FB account?
One with an employer whose HR department decided that Facebook abstainers are suspicious. Or in a small business where everybody has to pitch in on the social marketing.
I don't trust any site - for the most part - that asks for DOB, locations, schools, employers,et cetera. Why? Because they don't need to know
Onilne job applications ask for location, experience, and education. But I guess they're an example of a site outside "the most part" because HR does in fact "need to know" who is most likely to have the skills to be useful in the position and least likely to need a signing bonus to cover relocation.
If you’re always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden.
Exactly. That's why I post here so often as Anonymous Coward.
My wife's account with her real name closed arbitrarily by facebook together with her somewhat popular pages and groups. Reason: fake account. She scanned and sent her id and everything. Only response from facebook says this decision is final and cannot be reversed. So I am saying, fuck your policies Mark.
Most of the people I know have FB accounts, and probably 50% of them are "fake" by FB's policies. Most of us won't use our real names. In my case, it's because there is exactly 1 person on this planet with my name (yes I've tried to find more; there aren't any). Since I don't trust FB to not do stupid things with my data, I lie about my name. The rest of the data is real.
My friends are in the same boat - they lie about their names, but the rest is real. Does it really matter to FB if John Smith goers by Jimmy Applebottom?
Forcing people to use their real names online in a publicly accessible way is a terrible idea and will scupper your company. Facebook knows this because Google+ was/is arguably a better product, and was taking off fast, until Google started trying to force real names. Overnight, anyone with any kind of privacy concerns stopped using it and, despite Google still trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to ram Google+ down our throats any way it can, it's not really taking off.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Sure, people should be allowed to be anonymous, but it should never be okay to pose as someone else, fictive or real.
All real-looking accounts should be real, and a special type of accounts should be created for anonymous following of sensitive topics, commenting etc. This way you could have a personal account for family, old classmates etc and an anonymous account (personal of course) for all the sensitive stuff.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
One normal account, and another one who isn't friends with the normal one to check all the privacy and search settings, because I don't trust Facebook...
ugh, remind me why I have a normal account again?
Aside from that, some people enjoy anonymity simply by virtue of having a common name. I bet there are millions of real John Smiths who can hide in plain sight simply by virtue of their name. Yet someone with the unfortunate name Ammonia Bumblebee would be instantly and uniquely identifiable.
Anyway, I notice Facebook are pushing real identities more and some sites are requiring users sign on with a "verified" real account. But their manner of authentication is incredibly weak - provide a mobile telephone number. It is trivial to obtain a sim in many countries. e.g. in the UK every Poundland sells SIMs at the counter. Throw it into an old phone, use it to register on Facebook as "real", wait for the authentication code, and away you go. Pretty stupid really.
...its just a matter of exactly how fake they are. If you think the way people portray themselves online is 100% accurate, or that all those folks are really your friends, you have some serious issues with reality.
Google+ was/is arguably a better product, and was taking off fast, until Google started trying to force real names.
Maybe its just me, but I though Google+ tanked because lots of people I know signed up for it because of the hype, but nobody used it. Reminded me of Google wave.
I have two facebook accounts, one my real name, one a pseudonym. Both of them: ARE ME! ...
The second one I only have because I use an iPad app that requires a FB account to be used. I'm not so retarded to use my 'real name' account for that.
But surely there are true fake accounts, used for data mining etc.
Most children I know have "fake accounts" with an older brother/sister or a celebrity as photo and a fake age: even 6 year old girls are smart enough to tell me: if you put your real age on FB, "you get trouble".
Funnily all but one "friend" of my 'real name' account are real names as well
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You had Use*Net?
I remember when we used SMS and FTP and we liked it!
(of course, that's what twitter is for the most part, with some Mosaic thrown in)
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You'll need to first buy an ass out of which to pull a phone number. If you put in someone else's number, a number that isn't connected, or a number on a carrier that can't receive SMS, you won't receive the verification code that Facebook sends.
what I mean was if my number is already registered—say I just got a new number and whoever had it last already Verified it—then according to that page, I should just happen have another phone number...you know, from somewhere.
If you try to verify your account after another user has verified his account with the same number, Facebook locks it out and refers the user to the support system: "If you get an error that your mobile number is already registered when you try to add it to your Facebook account, let us know." What's likely to happen in that case, given what I know about Facebook's password recovery and 2-factor auth mechanisms, is that Facebook would remove verified status of the user who used to have your number. So if you have only one phone number, only one of your accounts can be verified. If you have multiple members of one household who use Facebook and share a phone, too bad.
I can't find anything about any sort of privileges FB would give if I Verified my number
Help pages on Facebook and elsewhere state that the privileges include skipping CAPTCHA, making a username (a human-readable URL for your account's public timeline), posting videos, and posting comments on sites that use Facebook authentication and require users to be verified (like The Huffington Post). Occasionally, Facebook will put up the so-called "roadblock" and require you to get verified just to keep logging in.
No, he doesn't see. :-) Don't confuse us with facts. Besides, just because your anecdote shows an anecdote doesn't scale doesn't mean his anecdote doesn't scale.
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