hello there! if you're new here and like what you read, you may want to grab the rss feed so you can always be up to date. thanks for visiting!

personally i’m becoming more and more annoyed with facebook since they have decided to open the network to everyone (from both a networking as well as a development point of view) but it seems that there are many others who have embraced the issues arising from these moves. not only are the users willing to add strangers to their networks but it appears that these users are unconcerned about protecting their privacy and personal information on the social networking site.

according to cnet, the i.t. security firm sophos created a fake facebook profile and added 200 random people as friends. out of those 200 people, 87 of them added the fake account as a friend and 82 of them gave the fake user access to personal information (while 5 users added the fake account with restricted access to their profiles). while the situation on facebook is much better than on myspace, users are still not as educated about the risks as one would hope.

But out of the 41 percent of those surveyed who divulged personal information to ‘Freddi,’ 72 percent provided at least one e-mail address, 84 percent gave their full date of birth, and 78 percent gave a current location (whether an address or just a city). More alarmingly, 23 percent provided a phone number and 26 percent provided an instant messaging screen name.

while the sample used by sophos was small, assuming it was truly random, the results are alarming. even more so considering the report from the nsba downplaying the security risks faced by uninitiated users online.