This was originally posted 16 years ago. Opinions, facts and reality may have changed.
I may have to rename this “The Facebook Cock-Up Blog” shortly. Yet again, the people who allow you to “connect and share with the people in your life” have scored an almighty own goal.
You may remember that a little over a week ago Facebook announced its new Groups feature: where people of like-minded interests could share information away from the prying eyes of the great unwashed. Nice idea, could be put to a lot of good use.
Except they made one tiny error…
Any member of a Group could invite anybody else to join. What happened to the security and privacy then? If I create a Group and want to restrict it to 10 people I trust and one of them – without my permission – invites someone to join that I don’t trust, then the whole ethos of the Group is destroyed.
But it gets better/worse (depending on your mood). If people are invited to join a Group, they don’t get a say in the matter; they are considered to have automatically-accepted. Which leads us to the killer blow.
Some wag set-up a Facebook group called NAMBLA: an acronym for North American Man-Boy Love Association, and invited some prominent people to join. The Group was entirely-fictitious and merely set-up to prove a point.
The Group owner invited Silicon Valley blogger and entrepreneur Jason Calacanis and Mike Arrington of tech blog Techcrunch to join (if you want to guarantee coverage for your “story”, then these are the two people to get involved). And both were automatically added to the Group’s membership and the fact plastered across their Facebook profiles.
Oops.
But, as is always the way with these things, the potential is far more sinister, as Chester Wisniewski of security firm Sophos outlined on his blog.
“Imagine you are traveling to the United States from overseas and your friends find it amusing to add you to a group that looks terrorist related. You might find a welcoming committee from the border patrol that you weren’t expecting,” he said.
Explaining the company’s rationale in developing Groups in this way, spokesperson Jamie Schopflin said : “If you have a friend that is adding you to groups you do not want to belong to, or they are behaving in a way that bothers you, you can tell them to stop doing it, block them or remove them as a friend – and they will no longer EVER have the ability to add you to any group. If you don’t trust someone to look out for you when making these types of decisions on the site, we’d suggest that you shouldn’t be friends on Facebook.”
When I was growing up, that was known as common sense.
As problems like this keep occurring, then maybe more people will think twice before adding dozens of new “friends” they really don’t know. That guy you went to school with 20 years ago that you feel obligated to have as a friend. Do you trust him? Would you miss him if you deleted him? Would he even notice?