Online Social Network Spam: Growing Trend? - Other Forms of Social Network Spam
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As I mentioned earlier Wikipedia defines social network spam a little differently from the way I’ve described it above. Social network spammers utilize a social network’s search tools to “target a certain demographic segment of users, and send notes to them from an account disguised as that of a real person. Such notes typically include embedded links to pornographic or other product sites designed to sell something. As of 2006, spamming software such as FriendBot is available to automate the process.”
Let’s change the context a little bit. Google recently unveiled its OpenSocial initiative. It will allow third party developers to build applications that can work with data from a wide variety of online social networks. By and large this is a good thing, but it’s easy to see how an unscrupulous developer might secretly turn one of these applications into an information harvester for himself. It could be something that happens in the background…and the user wouldn’t even realize that the information is being shared with someone else. What that someone else does with it could range from unwanted marketing to identity theft if the user wasn’t sufficiently careful.
Let’s also look at Facebook’s new advertising efforts in this light. The new initiative has three parts. The first part lets companies build their own pages on Facebook to connect with their target audience. The second part is a system through which the marketing message will be spread virally via Facebook Social Ads. The third part lets companies gather insight into the users’ activities on Facebook. The way the system works, however, is like this: when you “friend” a company or a product, your name and picture are used in an ad for that product. And this ad is sent to your friends. It hardly seems as if you’re consenting to this when you agree to “friend” the site – and the system might actually be illegal in New York.
Other activities that online social networks engage in raise all sorts of privacy issues. In a September blog entry, Ross Mayfield, co-founder of Socialtext, puts the problem plainly. “The fundamental privacy problem is that social networks grow virally by adding you to a graph without asking you to opt in. Once you are in the graph, it may be hard for you to know you are in, let alone opt out…You are modeled without your control over social context, and identity and relationship data can be layered on top of you as a node…Providers come in all stripes and you not only have to concern yourself with their ethical business practices, but the basic of security. Opening the graph to third party developers based on open standards is a laudable effort to solve one social graph problem. But the privacy concern of governance and oversight over those third party developers who have access to more data than users is uncharted.” It looks as if we’ll be traveling into a lot of uncharted territory in the months and years ahead.
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