Users Can't Distinguish Scams From Facebook's Features

Anyone who's seen social media sites like Facebook has probably also seen scam ads that promise new features or insider access to the sites themselves. rudy_wayne writes Zdnet reports that a new whitepaper from antivirus company Bitdefender, which examined 850,000 Facebook scams over two years, shows that Facebook's own user experience enables these scams to flourish. The researchers found that scammers have infected millions of users with the same tricks over and over again — just repackaged. The most common tricks, such as 'Guess who viewed your profile (45.5 percent)' and 'change your background color' (29.53 percent) rely on a combination of the obsessions encouraged by the Facebook experience, and a general lack of understanding about Facebook's functionality — which, as most users know, is a constantly moving target. Users would be none the wiser that a given scam isn't just a new "feature" or another of Facebook's psychological experiments being done on users.

Comments

Facebook is the scam

[Anonymous Coward]

The others are just playing catch-up

Re:Facebook is the scam

[bondsbw]

Advertisements should always be marked as such. I do not trust any service that does otherwise. (Not that this was the only thing keeping me from trusting Facebook.)

The only way to win the game...

[Mysticalfruit]

Is to not play at all.

Re:The only way to win the game...

[Shakrai]

Yeah, that's all well and good, except for the fact that Facebook has reached a critical mass; resistance may not be futile but it's damn hard:

1) I have friends all over the world; literally, on every continent. Is there a better centralized method of communicating with them? Should I send out a broadcast e-mail to all of them every time something noteworthy happens in my life? (Noteworthy actually means noteworthy in my world, I'm not logging check-ins every time I go to the grocery store....)
2) I have friends that only communicate via Facebook. They won't talk on the phone, they don't text, and they rarely check/answer e-mail.
3) Ever tried dating in the modern world without Facebook? It's instantly assumed that you're hiding something, which to be fair is frequently the case for people that refuse to share Facebook with would-be mates.
4) There's an ever growing list of companies and events that decline to maintain a webpage or otherwise keep it updated. If you want to stay abreast of their developments the only way is via FB or Twitter. This ties back into the critical mass comment from earlier.

Facebook is a necessary evil. It would be nice to see G+ displace them, because the G+ interface is light years ahead of FB's crappy software, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards does it?

Re: The only way to win the game...

[Anonymous Coward]

1) They don't care.

2) To hell with them.

3) Not the kind of person worth dating.

4) To hell with them.

Re:The only way to win the game...

[vux984]

) I have friends all over the world; literally, on every continent. Is there a better centralized method of communicating with them? Should I send out a broadcast e-mail to all of them every time something noteworthy happens in my life?...

Anything a friend broadcasts me is rarely worth reading. And a broadcast email etc for something like a baby being born etc ... is fine.

2) I have friends that only communicate via Facebook. They won't talk on the phone, they don't text, and they rarely check/answer e-mail.

Easy. Those aren't friends. :) Seriously... they WON'T communicate with you except on facebook, so therefore you MUST be on facebook?

3) Ever tried dating in the modern world without Facebook? It's instantly assumed that you're hiding something, which to be fair is frequently the case for people that refuse to share Facebook with would-be mates.

No. But then I'd consider that a handy filter. Anyone who thought I needed a facebook account isn't worth my time.

4) There's an ever growing list of companies and events that decline to maintain a webpage or otherwise keep it updated. If you want to stay abreast of their developments the only way is via FB or Twitter. This ties back into the critical mass comment from earlier.

I've yet to encounter one. Several local businesses have facebook pages instead of websites, but its public and it comes up when i search for them, even though I don't have a facebook account. Of course I can't "follow" them... but that's their loss not mine.

Facebook is a necessary evil.

No, its really not. I'm living without it just fine. No one in my household has an account. The kids think its stupid, and don't even want accounts.

Sure when we visit an aunt at thanksgiving we're a few months behind on the news... so what that we didn't know my niece has a new boyfriend the day it happened or that my brother in law has a new job? Catching up, gives us something to talk about.

Who?

[ThatsDrDangerToYou]

Who are these Facebooks and why are they on my internets?

Facebook indistinguishable from a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't tell Facebook vs a scam... both ask for personal information, promise a fantastic experience that is never delivered, and sell my personal information for a profit...
I can see why people struggle to differentiate the two.

Explanation is VERY simple

[gurps_npc]

Facebooks demands a huge invasion of privacy for a rather minimal set of features. Basically, you can get everything it offers elsewhere, for free, just giving up the 'single sign in', that lets them track you across everything. In other words, Facebook is itself a scam.

So it is not surprising that people that willing accept one scam, can not distinguish other scams from the official, approved scam they intentionally use.

Not designed that way

[s.petry]

Facebook has a known history of changing security settings, so safe today is not safe tomorrow. Almost every major security change has been done via stealth, leaving users to race to go fix things after the fact. This is just a behavior problem with the company so not the same issue as TFA is discussing, but worth mentioning since "playing safe" is impossible when a company intentionally circumvents all of your efforts to be "responsible".

The design of Facebook is such that you can't play safe. Conversations are ordered based on "likes", not based on chronology. So you have to get "likes" to be seen in a crowd, and you gain more "likes" by expanding your profile to more and more people. Anyone wanting to be seen has to open their profile to more and more people in order to compete, so the design is to not have tight control over who can see your information. In fact control is discouraged (and what gets broken most frequently in security changes). Contrary to your last sentence, scams happen to appeal to the people that use the system exactly as intended and designed (the point of TFA).

The implementation of the moronically named "Timeline" feature which removed chronological based dialogue and replaced it with "like" based dialogue was when I stopped using Facebook all together. Prior to that, I agree that Facebook could have been used for conversations with smaller groups. Even if no "likes" are assigned to comments algorithms order your post based on content Facebook wants to be popular. Cat memes will top political dialogue if the viewership is a high enough threshold for Facebook to notice.

In the words of Nancy Reagan, "Just say No!". (probably showing my age with that quote, so get off mah lawnz!)