Careful of What You Post on Facebook ...

No doubt that the latest online trend in today’s society is social networking.  MySpace paved the way for the new dominating trend that has taken many teens and preteens by storm.  Its successor, Facebook is growing rapidly throughout North America and is bound to have more users registered than the original social network, MySpace.  It has caught on in Europe and is the most popular social networking site in the UK, and it is slowly creeping towards the rest of the world and even in Asia and South America.

The reason why Facebook became such a dominating force in the web world is because it has seen the flaws of MySpace and has improved on them.  MySpace was the latest trend and if you did not have a MySpace page, you were considered to be uncool.  No one wants to be uncool, everyone wants to be cool, stay with the cool crowd, know what everyone is up to, and especially no parents knew about it. MySpace was, ‘the shit’ unfortunately online predators caught on with the network and started luring young innocent children, boys and girls into arranging dates to meet up with each other.  Once the stories of the children being kidnapped and raped and such appeared on mainstream television, parents, well everyone just went ballistic.  Due to the controversies of how easy it is for a pedophile to arrange a date with someone on MySpace, the social networking site just plummeted and no one uses it anymore.

Then comes along Facebook, created by Mark Zuckerberg (yes it is Wikipedia).  The reason why it became so popular is because it was just like MySpace, and A LOT more aesthetically pleasing to the eye.  MySpace is really cluttered and it is a miracle for someone to navigate their way through comments, postings, and pictures.  Facebook became very, very popular with the teens due to its enhanced security features that MySpace did not have.  For MySpace, anyone can add you as a friend and anyone can see your profile, if you don’t click on that privacy option.  With Facebook, only your friends and people in the same geographical or school network can view your account.  What a great way to deter pedophiles.  Commenting or posting on someone’s wall is much more easier in Facebook.  All one does is write their comment and cick on the post button.  Using some very elegant PHP and MYSQL coding, the comment is posted up on the page in a second or so.  With MySpace, well that is a whole other story.  First you write the comment, then you click post, then it redirects to a page to confirm that what you wrote is what you want on the page, AND then it makes you type in a CAPTCHA (to prevent spam bots) to confirm the post.  It can take up to a minute to write a post; what a waste of time. So Facebook has become the new kid on the block in which everyone is talking about.  Teenagers love it, website designers love it, and even parents prefer it over MySpace (prefer instead of love, because there are some parents who do not trust the website after the whole MySpace controversy).  So what’s not to like about it?  It has become ‘the shit’, the place for all the cool kids to to meet up at figuratively speaking that is. Unfortunately, the non tech savvy users do not know that Facebook is as dangerous and can be more dangerous than MySpace.

First off, a story about a college student who seriously injured a person in a car crash while under the influence of alcohol.  Joshua Lipton was at a party in halloween wearing a Jail suit and holding a can of redbull.  Picture of him were taken and not surprisingly, they were posted on Facebook.  During his trial, the prosecutor with the help of the victim’s friend was able to obtain the crazy party photos of Joshua as he partied all night long that Halloween night.  Using these pictures that were readily available, the prosecutor was able to depict Joshua as an “unrepentant partier who lived it up while his victim recovered in the hospital”.  The judge also agreed with the prosecutor and instead of maybe probation and some community service, the judge sentenced Joshua to two years in jail.  It is not looking good for Joshua, and it goes to show you that pictures on Facebook can bite you in the ass.

Pictures can be very, very embarrassing to people especially pictures of them drunk.  In Joshua Lipton’s case though, it got him two years in jail (he will probably appeal the decision though, maybe he’ll get out with a lighter sentence but who knows).  The photos can actually even make people famous over night, but not in a good way; for example the people who dressed up as the victims of the Virginia Tech Masacre. Even in poor taste someone will still do it, but this one, wow not good.

Facebook can also destroy your future.  There has been a big huge storm surrounding Facebook when employers revealed that they tried to go on the web to search for prospective applicants’ facebook pages and see their pictures to see what they are like in real life which evidentally can take a candidate out of the running.  Employers have even went through the trouble of contacting Facebook employees and asking them to go inside the accounts of prospective employees and give them access to their personal information and as well as ‘embarrassing’ photos.

The whole stalking thing with people these days or ‘creepers’ all comes from the pictures that people put up.  If there is a hot girl that someone wants to see pictures of, you can’t just add that person as they probably won’t know you.  But the hack-savvy ‘creepers’ these days can URL hack their way into their targets’ photo albums which is very creepy and scary. Facebook has probably cleared this problem up and created a new form of random access, hexadecimal coding enclosure (I don’t know what I’m saying here) preventing these ‘creepers’ and potential pedophiles from seeing pictures of not so legal teenagers.  There is also PHP, MYSQL, AJAX, Javascript manipulation that the pro coders can exploit in order to hack their way into facebook accounts or do some crazy stuff like the i-frame hack, but not that many people can do it…yet!  Soon they will and Facebook will have this problem.  Although once they find a bug/exploit they will fix that problem immediately, but there will come a time when an exploit surfaces and they can’t fix it.

Another problem with Facebook is that once you ‘delete’ your account, you do not actually delete your account, all you do is make it innactive.  When one deactivats their account and reactivates it, they are shown their page without any changes.  Thus meaning, the person did not actually delete their account, they just made it dormant.  It is a good feature for those who reactivate their accounts and do not want to go through the process of adding their friends again and posting old/new pictures.  The problem is, Facebook does not actually delete your account.  Once you deactivate it and ‘think’ you have deleted your information, Facebook still keeps your private information on their servers which if hacked, can be devastating. Also as well as the fact that employers can go in and ask the employees to look at your ‘deleted’ account.  It is not a nice feeling knowing that your personal information is still stored in computers and servers wating to be hacked.  It used to be, the only way to actually delete your account is to call the company and harrass them daily until they actually go into the servers and delete your account.  Why would someone need to call a website to delete their own information off the servers?  It is very time consuming for the user and costly for the website. Not to mention and pain the ass to just harrass them daily. Now the company has made it simpler for one to completely delete their account; the user can actually go into their account and choose to delete it.  Unfortunately, this option is very, very hard to find in the account which will lead many to just give up on searching for it and just deactivate their account.

One great thing about Facebook is the applications platform that it has created.  The networking site has allowed third party developers to develop fun games and applications for users to play around with.  One of the most famous applications is the ‘Jetman’ application which has become very addictive to everyone on Facebook.  It is a complete rip-off of the Helicopter flash game that was published many years before MySpace was developed, but no one really cares as no one is gaining any money from it.  But is that true?  It turns out that the third party applications when added steal the information of the person’s Facebook account and adds it to a database of users for the third party developers’ own use.  Some applications even can as far as looking into your friends’ pages and copying down their information.  The BBC News wrote a story on this very controversial and quite possibly life ruining flaw in social network.  Even though probably less than ten percent of all the applications being developed are used by most of the Facebook population, many malicious developers can create applications with hidden directives, directives that tell the application to copy down the user’s identity and their friend’s identity. This flaw shows a major concern in the privacy of Facbeook users and as well as this type of flaw can lead to theft identity, which can put someone in financial debt.  Quite possibly put someone in the situation of what the new movie ‘Eagle Eye’; shows.

These stories and links are just a sample of the problems that Facebook has with its design and coding.  By the time this post has been published, maybe most of these flaws/bugs/exploits have been fixed as many of these flaws are old news, about two years old or three years maybe.  Still, Facebook is a great platform for social networking nad most likely will become the benchmark model for all social networking sites…except for twitter.  That network is completely different. Even though many of the good things that Mark and his team of coders have developed/developing, the bad will always outweigh the good as with every new feature that Facebook releases, someone will find a bug or a flaw and find a way to exploit the network to their own advantage.  Still, Facebook will be the number one social networking site for years to come.  No other site other than MySpace (but thats on the verge of collapsing) will ever come close to the status Facebook has attained in the eyes of today’s society.  It is considered to be the perfect way to communicate and keep in touch with everyone you know. Orkut might have a chance but Google has a LOOOOOOOONG way. Hey, if Orkut does manage to beat out Facebook, looks like Google will become the new Microsoft! But that’s a completely different story for now.

source: techitloud.wordpress

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