Facebook App Permissions:
You Gave Away The Farm!
What Celebrity do you look like?
What’s your Ghetto name?
What color represents your personality?
95% of the people won’t get this right!
These little quizzes and “tests” are rampant on Facebook.
So is the cloning of accounts.
What’s the connection?
When these quizzes and such are clicked, most folks click right past the part where the app, that’s what they are called on Facebook, asks about what it can access in your account.
“This app can access your list of friends, your name and address, your birthdate and can tell you what color your shirt is”, are somewhat regular and give me cause for concern. I really don’t care if they know what color shirt I am wearing, oh WAIT, did I just let this app access MY CAMERA???? Holy BREACH OF PRIVACY Batman!!!
If you pay attention, you have GIVEN your personal information to an unknown company that disguised the request as a game or an app!!
After you complete the quiz or other action, it will always ask you to “share” it on Facebook. Then a friend clicks the same thing and shares it as well.
This is how these hackers build a database of who is connected to whom, and a database of personal information.
Once they have your personal information, hackers can now create a new account that looks like yours, send friend requests to the same friends that you already have and in the long run, eventually create a new cloned identity online.
What do they do with that?
How about going to 100 of your friends on the new friends list and trying to get money from them with a fake sob story? The list is endless with the scams that have been pulled online with faked accounts.
How about collecting enough data on you to create a new credit card?
How about creating a new persona that is used online to get goods and services?
Bottom Line:
- Do NOT click OK for anonymous apps to have access to your information EVER!!!
- If you can avoid taking the tests, surveys and such, you can ensure that your information is safe.