Facebook Is Dangerous!

Nicole Ferraro discusses how new social websites can be misused and threten our privacy
BBC: Facebook Is Dangerous!
Written by Nicole Ferraro


The BBC today published a harrowing report that third-party Facebook applications can access your personal data. Halfway through my reactive bout of running in circles and screaming in panic, I had to take a moment to wonder exactly where the BBC has been for the past year?

According to the report, the BBC, with the help of its crackerjack technology program Click, created a malicious third-party application to run on Facebook. The organization then made up a profile for some frat guy "Bob Smith," and went to work on stealing his personal data. (Sigh. Poor Bob...)

The BBC reports: "While we could not get all details, what we did get, included his name, hometown, school, interests and photograph, would certainly help us to steal someone's identity." Or, at very least, his lunch money.

The story would have been at least mildly interesting if the BBC exposed current, real applications that are eating our data in a malicious fashion, but alas: "We do not know of any specific application which abuses user information, apart from ours."

Well, then. Look who's malicious now!

The point of the expedition was to prove that Facebook's third-party applications acquire user data and, in turn, can leave users vulnerable should the app have ill intentions. Simply by reading Facebook's terms and conditions, or a blog, or a tea leaf, users would have figured this out themselves without putting old Bob Smith to work.

This idea that Facebook and its platforms aren't to be fully trusted is something we've been aware of for quite a bit of time. In fact, one of the issues the BBC "discovered" -- that we are responsible for our friends' data security -- is something one of our ThinkerNetters Mary Madden wrote about in her blog on Internet Evolution this week. Perhaps the BBC should spend less time in its mad scientist lab and more time on the blogosphere? Hmm?

Aside from the fact that BBC is telling an old story, this great, big, evil problem it claims to have exposed is not a homegrown Facebook problem -- it's an Internet problem. The moral of their story is that, although it's not happening right now, someone at some time on the Internet could create something that may harm you in one way or another. Bravo, Sir Holmes.

Nevertheless, it is always a positive thing to consistently challenge Facebook. This is the only real way to get the company to fix its flaws (of which it has many)... and it's also fun to get Mark Zuckerberg to shake in his sandals time and again.

— Nicole Ferraro, Site Editor, Internet Evolution