Facebook Prank by Lethbridge Students Renders Surprising Results
Students from the University of Lethbridge, just south of Calgary, decided to test out the privacy standards of Facebook as a class project. I have to give their method some credit as it was very effective despite the small sample group that the students used.
According to the article from The Calgary Herald, the students set up a fake Facebook account of an attractive-young woman and began sending out friend requests to about 50 other students from the University, about 30 of them were classmates. “Within two minutes, they had acceptances; within 24 hours, Mystery Girl had 25 friends, some of whom were asking her out on dates and revealing their inner thoughts in online chat sessions”. Again, all of this within 24 hours.
“It felt kind of creepy, for sure” says Sarah Lajeunesse, a third-year U of L student and member of the team that conducted the experiment.
As this student project points out, the creepers on social networks don’t necessarily have to be the stereotypical 40-year-old pervert sitting at home private messaging children from his fake Facebook account—their results were based off of 50 University students who were all in their early 20s. Pretty startling results.
Nevertheless, like the author of the article says, despite the notorious reputation that social-networking sites have earned, mainly due to online-privacy issues, Facebook and other social-networking tools possess a lot of positive potential.
The author gives examples such as the story out of Haiti where a man was pulled out alive from his wrecked house by a Facebook friend that read the man’s status update. Stories like this are not only inspiring but they show just how great social networks can be and how far we’ve come as an interconnected society. However, social networks are still very vulnerable to privacy loopholes and easy access by registered-sex offenders, and projects like the one at U of L act as evidence to that vulnerability.
Another interesting point brought up in the article was from Mary Dyck, a U of L professor and expert in inappropriate use of online communities. She says, “There are people who are really computers on Facebook, just collecting more and more marketing information”. This blew my mind…so I read on.
To accompany Dyck’s quote, the author writes about an instance of own experience using Facebook where, immediately after doing this interview, she went on her Facebook page to check her privacy settings to see if they were up to par. Upon doing so, she was greeted with an advertisement that said “48-year-old woman needed to test out Ugg boots: if you like them, you keep them!” She goes on to write, “Funny, only two weeks ago I was on eBay, trying to bid on a pair of Ugg boots. I never mentioned that anywhere on Facebook.” If this isn’t Invasion of Privacy, then I don’t know what is.
I decided to check out the comments section to see what people thought of the article. To my surprise, there were a couple of people who commented claiming to be online advertisers. One person said “…we do have access to the information – and frankly, if you think otherwise, you’re a fool.” The anonymous person goes on to claim that advertisers use Google Analytics to see what people have been shopping for, reading, and emailing. The other person, claiming to be a Facebook advertiser, says that advertisers DO NOT have access to such information; however, Facebook does give advertisers the option “to target people by age, geographical locations, interests, birthdays, etc.”
Take these comments with a grain of salt but also take them as a cautionary word of advice, and as a result, be careful what you post on your Facebook profile—double check your privacy settings and make sure you’re not giving people access to information that you don’t want them to have.
Mary Kay is a nationally-recognized Internet safety expert, and the founder of 
