Many Facebook Users Willingly Give Out Personal Information
While Facebook has gone to great lengths to improve privacy controls on its site, it would seem that many Facebook users do not show the same level of commitment to their own privacy. Recently, the Australian branch of the internet security firm Sophos conducted a study in which they created two fake profiles (Daisy Feletin, 21 year old single female and Dinette Stonily, 56 year old married female) and then sent 100 randomly selected friend requests to users matching those age groups.
Despite the fact that these were entirely fictitious profiles, nearly half of the the friend requests for both Daisy and Dinette were accepted, exposing users’ dates of birth, e-mail addresses, places of work, phone numbers, and even home addresses. Even worse, by accepting the fake Sophos-created accounts, these users exposed much of their own friends’ information as well.
Check below for the full results of the experiment.
| Information | Daisy Feletin | Dinette Stonily |
|---|---|---|
| Friends accepting | 46% | 41% |
| Total friends gained | 46 | 49 |
| Full d.o.b. (D/M/Y) | 89% | 57% |
| Partial d.o.b. (D/M) | 9% | 35% |
| Email address | 100% | 88% |
| College or workplace | 74% | 22% |
| Town or suburb | 50% | 43% |
| Full address | 4% | 6% |
| Phone number | 7% | 23% |
| IM screen name | 13% | 18% |
| Family and friend data | 46% | 31% |
| Average no. of friends | 220 | 932 |
As Sophos observes in their recap of the study,
“Ten years ago, getting access to this sort of detail would probably have taken a con-artist or an identify thief several weeks, and have required the on-the-spot services of a private investigator. Sadly, these days, many social networkers are handing over their life story on a plate.”
Because I spend so much time writing about social networking, web privacy, and internet security issues, I sometimes forget that many people simply don’t think about the importance of their online identities. Facebook can make as many modifications to their privacy controls as they want, but as long as there are users unwilling to use common sense about what they should and should not be doing online, there will always be a problem keeping data secure on social networking sites.