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Facebook’s Safety Board Created

Facebook has always been on top, when it comes to user privacy and keeping their information secure.  On Monday, Facebook announced they were in the process of forming the Global Advisory Board.  The group consists of five organizations including Common Sense Media, ConnectSafely, WiredSafety, Childnet International and The Family Online Safety Institute.

Facebook plans on regularly meeting with the group to get up to date information on security issues, to help protect user information.

The first task of the board will be to oversee an overhaul of the safety content located in Facebook’s Help Center. The goal of the overhaul is to create a comprehensive resource with specific educational content for parents, teachers, and teens.

Facebook is currently teamed up with MTV, running a campaign known as “A Thin Line.”  The campaign is designed to educate teens about cyber bullying and how to fight against it.
This comes at an interesting time however.  Sunday, Australian company Sophos released results from a recent survey to see how much information they could get Facebo0k users to share.  The company created two fake accounts, one for a rubber duck named, Daisy Felettin, and another for a cat named Dinette Stonily.

Sophos created two fictitious users with names based on anagrams of the words ‘false identity’ and ’stolen identity.’ 21-year-old ‘Daisy Felettin’ was represented by a picture of a toy rubber duck bought at a $2 shop; 56-year-old ‘Dinette Stonily’ posted a profile picture of two cats lying on a rug. Each sent out 100 friend requests to randomly-chosen Facebook users in their age-group.

Within two weeks, a total of 95 strangers chose to become friends with Daisy or Dinette — an even higher response rate than when Sophos first performed the experiment two years ago with a plastic frog. Worse still, in the latest study, eight Facebookers befriended Dinette without even being asked.

So are Facebook users just too friendly, or are they still unaware of the dangers of adding people they don’t really know?  The company states you should limit what others see with your privacy settings, which allow you to change what each “friend” can see or just don’t accept or add friend requests from people they don’t know.

To hear more of Sophos results, you can watch a video they placed on YouTube.