After listening to today’s presentation about “think twice, click once” privacy with online sites, it got me thinking about what I have opted to as privacy settings for my facebook account. Online I went searching for something that could tell me more about my settings on facebook, and when I typed in facebook privacy in a Google search, second on the list came the titled website How to View Private Facebook Profiles at the address www.makeuseof.com/.../how-to-view-private-facebook-profiles/.
It website on how to view private facebook profiles was created by a man who quotes that “I’ve always had a penchant for finding flaws within supposedly secure systems. Those sort of activities got me into a lot of trouble in high school, and certainly banned from the high school computer lab once or twice.” He mentions on his website that “early last year I decided to join Facebook, and in doing so, I learned an intriguing fact about this fast-growing social network: Facebook profiles are usually private.” Figuring out how to view private Facebook profiles became a brief hobby of his for a few months and on this website he shares what he’s learned over those few months with MakeUseOf readers.
He goes on to tell the reader that whatever sort of hacks are uncovered, Facebook will have it patched tomorrow. Early on there were different methods how to view private Facebook profiles by typing a URL using just the right format and code, and inserting the person’s Facebook ID into the URL. However, every time one method worked, it only took Facebook a few weeks or less to patch up the hack.
So I’ll make this short and sweet and let you read the article for yourself- but basically what this person is showing the reader how to view private facebook profiles with social engineering. In his article he goes on to explain to the reader how the easiest way to view someone’s facebook profile is to use simply send them a message and hope they reply. He says that by sending them a message on facebook, with any sort of response from the person, positive or negative, will allow you to partially access their account.
1. Send them a message like, “Hey! We went to school together, do you remember me? I think we sat together in Geometry.”
2. They may respond with something like, “I don’t know who you are, get lost.”
3. You now have temporary access to view their profile.
What I find most interesting about this website is the how this person is using psychological conversation to have access to someone’s personal account, even if the person does not accept them as a ‘friend’.
Here is the link to the aricle so you can read it for yourself: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-view-private-facebook-profiles/
1 comments:
That's really interesting! It's definitely good to know. Thanks for sharing! I feel like our presentation could have been solely about privacy on facebook... but we wanted to cover more than one base. It's certainly a minefield of privacy issues, isn't it?
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