Facebook: Are You Being Searched?
Once upon a time, Julian Assange said “Facebook is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented.” Most people assumed that he was alluding to state secrets and corporate governance. But like Alice, famous for her adventures in Wonderland, he meant what he said in a way he never realized.
Teenagers would know what Formspring is – a forum that allows you to “Ask questions and/or answer them, anonymously or not”.
Well, I have news for them. In order to check out the site, I applied for membership. I gave an e-mail address I rarely use, and a user name different from all the others I have floating around on the ether. I also gave a different birth date – day, month and year.
So imagine my surprise when I tried to “find friends” and up came my Facebook wall in my own name, and my most-used Google account, not the one of which I had used as an address to solicit membership. So much for privacy. This means that Formspring tracks people who join it, through devices and methods that are not stated in the terms.
I wrote to them as follows: I became a member under my address (<>) and though I asked twice for confirmation e-mails, these did not come. Then I tried to “find friends” and although my Facebook address is NOT the one with which I became a member, the page came up. Also, the twitter account came up, and THAT is not the address name I used, either. So, how did YOUR system find those two accounts of mine if the information is different?
This time, ironically, I did receive a reply – in the e-mail address that the system was telling me “does not exist”.
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That’s all. Nothing else to explain why they sourced my Facebook wall and a different e-mail address (despite the fact that I never gave them my name or my correct date of birth, and used a different e-mail address)… Nothing about how I may delete my account
There are lists of warnings on different sites about how to protect your privacy. But unfortunately, they rarely tell you the important things about how each time you click on a link, or use an e-mail address, or make a search, or give out personal details, you are practically drawing a roadmap to your brain, and even your soul, if you believe you have one, on the Web.
What’s more, anyone can access these details, with guesswork – from friends, potential employers to nefarious stalkers. And most public information can never been taken off the internet, no matter how much you plead with, cajole, and threaten the webmasters.
1. Open a new tab and key in the name of your teenager and the word Facebook, or Twitter, or any other social site at which you believe they might have an account. Are you surprised that people may find them, you as you have found them yourself? Privacy controls are there for a reason – get your kids to use them.
2. Foursquare, Twitter, Loopt, Google Buzz, and Facebook Places tell your teenagers; friends where they are at any given moment – but they also tell hackers and anyone else with legitimate access to their accounts. Not nice. What is a teenager to do when a pleasant-looking lady walks up to her and says “hi! Aren’t you Stephanie from my niece’s class?”
3. Photographs and You Tube videos, especially those shared by others in which they tag teenagers, may not always be complimentary. Some of these so-called friends may have hidden agendas, and some may have done it without thinking. Either way, a teen’s privacy is invaded if he did not give his explicit permission to be featured on someone else’s pages.
4. Sites like the aforementioned Formspring and Chatroulette allow people to be anonymous. You may argue that so would a Facebook account under a false name; but there is a big difference. For Chatroulette you need not register – all you need is attitude and a webcam. In these interactive sites, there is so little time-lapse between thinking, seeing, talking and doing, that teens who are not as quick as the person(s) contacting them may err grievously.
5. Websites boast that they will “not sell your e-mail address or other information”. So can you please explain how, when ,in a comment left on Facebook one uses a particular brand name or topic, one often notes an advert popping up with the selfsame word, or at least, topic?
6. Teenagers might find it difficult to remember user names and passwords, avatars, fame tags, and other identifiers (including answers to “security questions”) especially if they belong to tens of different sites’ memberships’ list and forums. They are not likely to keep a tiny notebook with all of them written down, or even a Word document. So they chances are that they sue the same information for different sites, and this makes them more easily traceable. They may not believe that a number of the “teenagers” on these sites are trying to find someone whom to groom.
7. Many sites have an option that indicates when a user is online. This alerts the undesirables as well as the friends who would have agreed to be online at that given time. Even if there are filters and moderators, some may be wily enough to slalom past them with red herrings such as “can you explain what you mean?” which just might encourage a child to go off-list to explain a game strategy or a comment – and the trap is set. Nobody, except the people whom the child wants to contact, and his parents/ carers, need to know that he is online.
8. There are sites associated with certain products that ask teenagers, ever so gently, whether they would like to be contacted about merchandising, or to be asked about products. They sweet-talk children by offering them discounts, and contests, and other deals. Meanwhile, the database of the company is growing.
Now do you know why it is better to err on the side of caution when it comes to privacy on the internet?
