Married Woman Claims Facebook Info Sharing Created Dating Profile For Her

jenningsthecat writes A happily married Ontario woman was shocked and dismayed last January to discover that she had an active account with dating site Zoosk.com. Mari Sherkin saw a pop-up ad on Facebook for Zoosk, but wasn't interested, so she "clicked on the X to close it. At least I thought I did." She immediately began to receive messages from would-be Zoosk suitors in her Facebook mailbox. When she had a look on Zoosk she was horrified to find a dating profile with her Facebook picture, name, and postal code. Zoosk denies ever setting up profiles in this way, yet their terms of service explicitly allow them to do it, and there are apparently several Facebook pages with complaints of similar occurrences.

Comments

Honest, honey...

[Jawnn]

...I would never have done something like that.

Re:Honest, honey...

[tompaulco]

If you are not careful, you absolutely can click on the X and count as a click through, because some of these scum sucking low lifes just put a picture of an X there and it is not really the close button. Sometimes you can tell because your windows theme is different and they have made a static picture of the standard close X. I'm sure plenty of people are fooled by that. Then there are all of the onClose exploits, which you can defeat with some javascript, but a small minority of people know how to do that.

Re:Honest, honey...

[LessThanObvious]

The fake X close button is something I really fear will become a broad way of exploiting vulnerable users. Many of the X buttons even in seemingly legitimate pop-ups don't tell you anything about the action it will take even by doing a mouse over. Users are accustomed to blindly clicking the X to close even if it doesn't look like a regular Windows close button. I spent some time using the Firefox "inspect element" feature and I didn't find any that did something nasty on close, but it seems like this trend of embedding a close button or X into in-page popups is ripe for exploitation. I would encourage sites allowing this kind of advertising to define a standard to allow users to better know the safety of the close action. It would take a lot to train users to Alt-F4 every time they get one of those if they aren't running NoScript.

Re:Honest, honey...

[the_B0fh]

Did you not read the article where they quoted the actual terms of service that said you authorized them to create a profile for you automatically?

Why ask for extraordinary evidence when the site itself tells you it will do that?

She thought she was the customer

[Spy Handler]

but found out she's the product.

Re:She thought she was the customer

[Jason Levine]

"This clause saying they can harvest my organs and sell my kids is outrageous! I'm going to start a Facebook page protesting this at once!"

"Happily married"

[Anonymous Coward]

Facebook knows her true feelings about her husband.

Same problem

[kamapuaa]

I had the same problem, I clicked the wrong button and Facebook loaded up all these photos of my ex-girlfriends! Hopefully if I show this article to my wife she will take me back.

Re:Hmmm ...

[greenwow]

Sounds like what mint.com was doing. Bank of America gave them information including account numbers, names, and email addresses. mint.com then created accounts for those people without their permission. I had never heard of mint.com when they sent an email to me with the last few digits of my BoA account and the balance. Later they added information with Chase so they sent an email with my credit card balance. I had never use mint.com, but they created an account with my private information. They are scumbags even worse than these dating sites.

Morpheus was right

[ArcadeMan]

Morpheus: What is Facebook? Control. Facebook is a computer-controlled world built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this.
[holds up an ad]
Neo: No, I don't believe it. It's not possible.
Morpheus: I didn't say it would be easy, Neo. I just said it would be the truth.

Popup ads?

[tompaulco]

How did she get a popup ad on facebook? I finally succumbed to getting a facebook account because that is how the big band I am in communicates. I have literally never had a popup ad while on facebook.

Re:Zoosk will claim programmer error.

[ArhcAngel]

It's actually more likely user bamboozling. Since nobody on /. has a facebook account let me use a comparison you've likely run into.

Have you ever clicked a link to download software from one of the umpteen free file hosting sites and get greeted with a page full of ads and three or more links on the page that simply say download now? You have to decipher the page to determine which link/button on the page actually downloads the file you want. Have you ever just clicked the first download now link you saw and got something OTHER than what you were expecting? Or better yet it looked like the file you wanted but once you opened the file it was actually something else! Companies that live and die by their user numbers will do anything to inflate those numbers including tricking you into agreeing to opening an account and making it so easy you didn't even know you consented.