My 1st Status is one of the more recent scams found on Facebook. Don’t fall for it. At first glance you will see a number of friends with a status purporting to be their first ever Facebook status. It will say “hi everyone” or “hi y’all” or something else fairly generic, and therefore believable.
If you look closely however, the date given for this initial post is the same for all of your friends and their first statuses are all remarkably similar. With this application, as with them all, you will be given a link to click to try it for yourself.
A simple glance at the permissions asked for should be enough to frighten you off. When you hit the Allow button you are giving total strangers the right to:
- Access your basic information, including name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends and any other information you’ve posted.
- Post to your wall status messages, notes, photos and videos
- Access your data any time
- Access your data when you’re not using the application
- Manage your events
- Create and RSVP to events on your behalf
Ways to identify and protect yourself against this and other Facebook scams
Always read the list of permissions you are granting. If you wouldn’t give someone in real life the right to RSVP to events without checking with you first it probably isn’t a good idea to let total strangers do it.
If a friend has posted a link to sensational story, usually involving sex, violence, death or incarceration as the result of a status update and you have to grant permissions before you can read the shocking story, there most likely isn’t a story at all. In fact, your friend probably didn’t even post the comment above the story that urged you read it. Most likely, you have been clickjacked.
This means you have been tricked into clicking on something, in the form of embedded code that you would never knowingly click on. If you have the slightest doubt, don’t click before checking with the friend who posted the link.
Furthermore:
- If you don’t want to have to worry about whether or not to click, you can buy commercial software such as GuardedID to protect your computer from clickjacking schemes.
- Never give your phone number, password or any other personal information in order to activate any application. If they are asking, they aren’t legitimate.
- Never download anything in order to view or access an application. If you are told you need an upgrade to software you knowingly have installed on your computer go to the company site and download it there instead.
Social networking sites are here to stay and Facebook is currently king of the hill, which means that it will continue to be a target for hackers and hucksters and other malicious sorts. A little caution will keep you and your computer safe.
Katherine Scrimshaw - Katherine Scrimshaw is a freelance writer and editor with a background in public relations, broadcasting and not-for-profit administration ...
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