zlacker

Sounds like the idea is that the fake profiles are created so they can make mass "friend requests". Then, when those friend requests are accepted by some amount of your actual friends, it unlocks more access to your data. Or even more if you're fooled and accept one of the fake profiles as a friend/follower.

I guess NYPD's way around people that don't make their profiles fully public.

It would be interesting if Facebook is willing to punish/ban/etc not just the companies directly doing this, but their clients as well.

>>tyingq+(OP)
You raise an interesting point. Friend requests. I remember some researchers set up a fake profile of a woman who worked for the US department of defense. The profile was inundated with men requesting friendship connections.

I don't accept a friend request unless I actually know the person. Do people randomly accept these requests knowing nothing about the other person than what is on their profile?

>>Simula+a1
I mean IG et al are designed so “number of followers” is a visible metric of social status, so a lot of people do.

>>Simula+a1
I get a couple of friend requests a month, mostly from very attractive young women. I get a couple of fake requests from people pretending to be friends or family a week.

>>tyingq+(OP)
This is an old strategy, and one of the reasons I don't accept random friend requests.

It isn't just the NYPD that does this, it's advertisers, data mining companies, financial institutions, employers, nation-states, ex's, stalkers, etc.

It's cheap and easy to do, so why wouldn't organizations mine that data that have the resources to do so?

>>Simula+a1
> Do people randomly accept these requests knowing nothing about the other person than what is on their profile?

Yes, most people don't have a million friends on social media and will take what they can get, and the age-old honeypot tactic will never not work. If an attractive person shows interest in someone, they'll probably take it.

>>heavys+Z1
If your strategy is to give private data to an ad company and then expect who you do or do not friend to be the perimeter that controls its distribution, you have already lost.

The best thing you can do is to delete your profiles on these services.

>>heavys+i2
That's really odd to me. My Facebook friends are people I know from real life. Every so often I get random accounts (usually attractive women in random locations with no mutual friends) trying to add me and I will report them as spammers.

>>heavys+Z1
Have you ever had friend requests from a "clone"? An actual IRL friend of yours, but it's a scam duplicate of their profile. It's not always immediately obvious if this isn't a friend you interact with regularly, like someone who accepted a request from years ago.

>>sneak+a3
Such services are useful (to me, for one), you're throwing out the baby with the bath water.

>>pbhjpb+ia
The problem is that when you are on it, you contribute to the network effect and make it more useful to others to submit themselves to surveillance in turn. You and your interactions with your friends becomes the honey in the trap.

I urge a visit to the Stasi museum in Berlin.

>>Middle+I7
I'm the same way, but the platforms incentivize the collecting of friends and have like a decade+ of gameification features to promote it.

>>sneak+a3
I agree, but there's no reason to make it easier for even more parties to get their hands on the data if you're going to use them anyway.

>>aqme28+I9
Hasn't happened that I know about, but I only accept requests after confirming with the person who added me that they sent it. I spent too much time in parts of the internet where catfishing like that was done routinely as trolling.

>>pbhjpb+ia
The baby has already died and the bathwater is diseased and festering. Give it a proper funeral if you like, but it needs to be buried deep in the ground where it cannot spread any more disease.

>>sneak+ya
The Stasi museum was horrifying. It felt like walking thru the history of American politics of the past 20 years in parallel.

>>heavys+rL
Perhaps Twitter or Instagram, which seem to involve people mixing their personal lives with strangers (idk never really used them), but regular Facebook doesn't seem to be used that way by anyone I know.