Social networking: the age of innocence is over.

I had the opportunity to see the excellent BBC ‘Click’ over this past weekend on BBC World.  They covered the viewer, and on-line reaction, to their story of a few weeks back, on writing a rogue Facebook application. The Click team wrote a ‘skimming’ application that in effect was able to go around and harvest data from the profiles in a ‘friends’ list.

This story set off a lot of reaction from viewers and users of the site.  Facebook did point out that it has a code of conduct that it asks and expects developers to abide by: limit the collection, use, storage of data etc. They also have a team of people dedicated to helping weed out application developers who do not follow the rules.

In reading the responses to this story from people I was struck with a numbers of things.  First and foremost the sense of outrage, that such a respected and well thought of site could, somehow, have been violated in such a way.  Users of Facebook care about it in a personal way. There was a palpable sense of indignation. However, this is an example of how social networking sites can be vulnerable to the people who would want to invade it. That very sense of trust that binds the many millions of people who use social networking sites, such as Facebook, can also be the Achilles heel.  Trust begets respect. However, what this incident shows is that potentially malware authors, who have no respect for anything or anyone, could use this as a new ‘fertile’ marketplace for their endeavours.

Facebook and other social neworking sites will learn from this I am sure.  There was an effective way to stop this type of rogue application, but it is buried within the Privacy settings (privacy/applications/other applications), where you can select the option of ‘ Do not share any information about me using the Facebook API’.  Well, I think they need to bring this option much closer to the attention of the user and in simpler language that means something to someone.

Does it mark the end of the age of innocence for  social networking? Well, I think so and in the long run it may not be a bad thing.

For more information on the story, go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/7375772.stm

May 24, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized 

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