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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.
Is to not play at all.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
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.
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.)
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.