Facebook opening the door to identity theft with sloppy security standards

Posted on 07 May 2008 by


A team from the BBC successfully stole personal information from four Facebook users via a small application like those you can install on the popular website.
Facebook has grown to be a very popular social networking site and one of its interesting feature are small applications that can be games, quizzes, etc. The BBC team programed one such application to mine data aptly named Miner.

Spencer Kelly is a presenter for the BBC show Click and he explained that Miner “in the background, it is collecting personal details, and those of the users’ friends, and e-mailing them out of Facebook, to our inbox When you add an application, unless you say otherwise, it is given access to most of the information in your profile. That includes information you have on your friends even if they think they have tight security settings”

Apparently, Facebook reacted by saying they are always working to secure the site and are monitoring the applications. I guess whatever they are doing is just not cutting it.

Link: BBC Facebook ID Theft Video
Link: Identity “at risk” on Facebook

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- who has written 10 posts on Gear Diary.

Bjenk is a Canadian social researcher in the fields of urban, youth and work studies. He is currently a Postdoctorate fellow at the Australian Youth Research Center, University of Melbourne and visiting scholar at McGill University. Before pursuing his passion for academic social research, he was an entrepreneur in IT. In his spare time, Bjenk enjoys reading, playing video games and studying traditional cabinetmaking.

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  • http://www.justanothermobilemonday.com patrickj

    I have been using and liking Facebook less and less for months, and with this and other recent headlines on it, I’m amazed any of us still use it at all.

    It seems fairly obvious that they’ve paid little or no attention to security, even while encouraging vendors to help piss off users by tracking your every movement etc.

  • http://www.geardiary.com Judie Lipsett

    I mainly use it anymore to play Scrabulous with a few friends. :-P