“However, not all companies will be as ethical.”Ĭomparitech recently surveyed 1,000 British internet users, and found that only 7% said they would willingly give up their personal information to use Facebook apps like quizzes if they knew that data would be going to third parties. “It should be noted that the company behind this app, Vonvon, has since stated it does not make commercial use of or sell any personal data and has amended its terms and conditions following this story,” says Patterson. His company published a blog post in 2015 about a Facebook quiz called Most Used Words, which signed up more than 18 million people to terms and conditions that gave permission for their data to be sold to third parties, as well as giving the app access to their name, profile picture, age, sex, birthday, friend list, entire history of Facebook posts through to details of their IP address and device. Photograph: Piotr Malczyk / Alamy Stock Phot/Alamy Stock Photo Unlike … more than 18m people signed up for their data to be sold to third parties when using a Facebook quiz in 2015. “Consumers readily click ‘accept’ on terms and conditions for Facebook apps and quizzes, often without a second thought,” he says. Richard Patterson, director of, says people often unknowingly give permission for their data to be passed on. AVG’s senior security evangelist Tony Anscombe says social-engineering attacks are dominated by surveys that promise free things but actually harvest personally identifiable information about the user with the intent to use this for malicious or fraudulent reasons. Those quizzes and surveys that your relatives delight in completing and sharing? Some security experts think they’re very dangerous, too. “We have noticed a growing trend where scammers are not only stealing login credentials but asking for victim’s payment information, too,” she adds.įake news stories aren’t the only thing putting users are at risk. Jovi Umawing, a malware intelligence analyst at Malwarebytes, says scammers take advantage of real-world events with fake news links. “Then, once the post (or page with multiple posts), has received a high number of engagements, the content flips to something more nefarious, or simply gets hidden behind a task the user must now complete to view content.” A potential threat source will post a funny meme, video, or cute pet picture, the type highly likely to go viral,” he says. “One increasingly popular guise cybercriminals take starts with the mundane. Dimitri M, cybersecurity analyst at BestVPN, says that changes to initially innocuous content can catch Facebook users unawares. It’s the click-through with all the promise and no delivery.” Viruses, worms, trojan horses, ransomware, spyware and other malware are installed in this way. Gavin Hammer, of social-media software firm Sendible, says: “The issue is they are legitimate websites who are paying to advertise, but are subsequently changing content. Facebook scams take a number of forms, from fake news stories to suspect quizzes to pages that phish for users’ personal details.One of the common tricks is to tempt users with clickbait headlines that seem to link to interesting or quirky news stories, but in fact lead to dangerous waters. They are seen as a cost-effective method of compromising many users with relative ease, according to Cisco’s director of cybersecurity in the UK, Ireland and Africa, Terry Greer-King.
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