You are security conscious and know all the Internet do and
don’ts, but sometime it is going to happen. You’re going to fall for click
bait, open an infected email attachment, or fall for a social media hoax.
You’re not dumb. You’re not gullible. You’re not alone. People of all ages,
backgrounds, and intelligence will fall for social media hoaxes. Including this
writer.
As with any scam, whether it is a criminal affair or a joke,
the perpetrators play on our human nature and how we react to stimuli. Must
notably anything that threatens our family or personally well being. Fear. As
with any con, the perpetrator uses broad, widely known information, with some
truth sprinkled in for good measure. Sometimes, as the case with privacy issues,
will use functions of the app to make it believable. Instructing the victim to
perform a function within the app that produces a result. When the result
happens, it further validates the hoax.
The ones that get you are intelligently written in a generic
style or tone that could be from any close friend or relative that you would
normally trust. They either forward the item to you, or worse, endorse it with
a message that reads something like, “Tried it. It works!” or “This is true”.
Most people don’t do research. If so and so posted it must be true, and we
quickly click ‘share’. After fourteen years, Facebook is still having trust
issues with its users. Anything that hints at a privacy scandal runs wild and
users react.
Hoaxes, just like malware, circulate, mutate, and resurface,
sometimes years after being launched. The one that got me was the ‘Following
me’ security check on Facebook. [Spoiler alert-It’s a hoax] You receive a
message from someone you trust that reads like the photo heading of this blog
post. And trust me, it will read like the above photo because the original
language just keeps getting forwarded. Following the steps outlined in the post
you’ll find these unknown people “following” you on Facebook. You quickly go to
the next step and start deleting all of these unwanted followers. How dare they
intrude onto my highly secure and private Facebook page! The nerve.
After testing the theory and seeing that it does indeed
reveal hidden followers, you forward the message on with your own endorsement.
Because it does work, it must be true. You have to alert all of your friends. I
didn’t go that far. But it did give me an idea for a blog post. A couple
minutes of research had me SMH. Got me!
Snopes.com addressed this very hoax in a January 2017
article that was updated in September 2017.(Are Facebook users secretlyfollowing you?) Snopes traced the origin to a rumor post being circulated
that Facebook security teams were paid to follow individual accounts. The post
read similar to the one pictured except the user was instructed to enter
‘Facebook security’ in the block users search box. While this did return a list
of people, it was determined to be people who had used ‘Facebook security’ in
their profiles. In September 2017, the hoax took on the form we have pictured.
However, now following the instructions returns a list of people that have “me”
in their profiles.
In fact, the search box reads
So the hoaxers set you up with instructions that return what
they want, a list of people you’ve never heard of, which gives validity to the
hoax. Which gets it forwarded. And on and on and on it goes.
Please feel free to share. See the blog archive for more
posts about privacy.
Are you being watched? February 2018
Are you being watched? February 2018
