A (non?) Social Experiment
May 19, 2010 9:54 AM   Subscribe

You may know someone who’s been in an unhealthy, abusive relationship and yet still can’t bring themselves to break it off… Regardless of what exactly might motivate someone to remain in a dysfunctional and destructive relationship, such love affairs tend to cause people to act rather irrationally. It’s not that bad, they tell themselves, vainly hoping that things will miraculously change for the better. Let’s face it: very few of these situations ever improve. But sometimes, a person’s immense fear of isolation makes an abusive partner seem much more welcoming than the daunting prospect of being alone.
Ryan Benhase documents his upcoming participation in Quit Facebook Day.

Quit Facebook Day is May 31. Will you be participating?
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis (74 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: There's plenty of active discussion of why Facebook sucks/doesn't suck/etc, and at least one mention of this particular thing, in this two-day old thread, and framing a post around a kind of shitty and risible pullquote metaphor isn't helping anything besides. -- cortex



No. I use Facebook to communicate with friends who don't know better. I'm careful about what I tell it. If I wouldn't want my mom or boss to know something, I won't type it into Facebook.

That said, I will be glad to try a more open, private alternative once it's ready.
posted by mccarty.tim at 9:57 AM on May 19, 2010


What social network am I going to take all of my friends to? If diaspora gets standardized and one can choose from an array of options (self host vs free google hosting vs ISP hosted) then I'll gladly quit.
posted by BrotherCaine at 9:58 AM on May 19, 2010


Comparing Facebook to domestic violence does not strengthen his case against Facebook.
posted by The Straightener at 10:00 AM on May 19, 2010 [33 favorites]


"Am I going to far in the comparison"

"Far" doesn't begin to justify an incredibly STUPID statement. FB and abusive relationships? Hardly. Fucking drama queen.
posted by stormpooper at 10:01 AM on May 19, 2010 [2 favorites]


I sympathize with folks that think they're being hurt by their (voluntary) association with Facebook, but equating that relationship with folks who have been physically, mentally and/or sexually assaulted by their domestic partners or family members is pretty fucking heinous in my (not so humble) opinion. Can we get a sense of proportion, please?
posted by zarq at 10:01 AM on May 19, 2010 [10 favorites]


Yeah the main draw of Facebook originally was the fact that it had lots of people that I knew on it. I don't see the point of switching to something else unless all of my friends do too.
posted by Dr. Send at 10:01 AM on May 19, 2010


Oh boy! Facebook's very own rapture!
posted by bondcliff at 10:02 AM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]


Might help if the reminder email thing worked:

"Whoops! Looks like you entered nothing. Please go back and try again."

Needless to say, I entered something.
posted by metaxa at 10:02 AM on May 19, 2010


Friends don't let friends unfriend themselves.
posted by Postroad at 10:03 AM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]


Is this something I'd have to have a The Facebook to understand?
posted by Nothing... and like it at 10:04 AM on May 19, 2010


Most of my social network runs off FB now; the ease of keeping in touch outweighs, I'm afraid, legitimate fears for privacy. I've got everything locked down on all my settings, and check them periodically in case the Management just decides to change things around again. And rely on the rest of the web to tell me what to watch out for.

Facebook has connected not only my friends with each other but brought me back in touch with many people I thought I'd never see again. I don't think that its users are going to leave it en masse; for one thing, at least for my kid's generation, a lot of users are happy to have their stuff out in the public realm, and even flaunt it-- drunken party pictures and all.
posted by jokeefe at 10:04 AM on May 19, 2010 [2 favorites]


Also, this event was linked both in the comments of the already open facebook thread you linked to in the FPP, and this open thread about Facebook. Welcome to FacebookFilter. :P
posted by zarq at 10:04 AM on May 19, 2010 [2 favorites]


If I wouldn't want my mom or boss to know something, I won't type it into Facebook.

How do you prevent other people from typing it into Facebook? Obviously, they can do that even if you aren't there, but they can't *link* to you if you aren't there.

That's when I deleted my account. I already wasn't using it, but I found myself getting tagged in photos by other people.
posted by DU at 10:05 AM on May 19, 2010 [2 favorites]


I quit three months ago and haven't looked back.
posted by blucevalo at 10:05 AM on May 19, 2010


I stunned a party of media people last night by saying I'm not on any social network (aside from twitter ....and ....here?) The legitimately shocked expressions made my day.
posted by The Whelk at 10:05 AM on May 19, 2010 [4 favorites]


Can we teach this person to use Linux and get under the hood a bit? I am eager for the article about kill -9.

"After the first few times, I found myself becoming rather casual about it. Yeah, I murdered that process. I took it out of this little virtual world and I'd do it again. Sure, I could have suggested it be more nice, but I am cold inside ..."
posted by adipocere at 10:05 AM on May 19, 2010


Also, re Quit Facebook Day: so far there are about 6K people signed up. I'm willing to bet that on an average day there are that many account deletions already, just in the general flow of managing a site with millions of users. Unless they manage to sign up a hundred times that number, FB isn't even going to notice. Just a blip in the stream.
posted by jokeefe at 10:06 AM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]


What The Straightener said. There's a reason I don't call sleeveless white-t shirts wife-beaters anymore and neither should you.

No matter how you feel about Facebook (sucks face), that metaphor is about 100 times worse.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 10:07 AM on May 19, 2010


What might be a good idea: Make a list of friends that you don't ever see in person before you kill FB. Then make a plan to visit them within the next 10 years. It'll be just as if you were reading their status updates all along, except you'll get it all over at once, and maybe get a nice dinner out of it.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 10:09 AM on May 19, 2010


If I wouldn't want my mom or boss to know something, I won't type it into Facebook.

Oh and the advertising. Are you OK with FB making serious cash on selling even the meager amount of data you hand over to them?
posted by DU at 10:09 AM on May 19, 2010


Quoting a bad metaphor in an FPP does not indicate my agreement with said metaphor! I thought Quit Facebook Day deserved its own post (if only to get some exposure and increase that 6K number) and Behase's analogy was so controversial I couldn't not use it.
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 10:12 AM on May 19, 2010


Hardly a week passes when someone doesn't tell me that I need to get The Facebook. Many of them are people I've already told that I'm not interested to at least twice before. Oddly, they tell me these things via online chat or irc or email, meaning that they already know how to keep in touch with me without me having The Facebook.

I've been online long enough to have learned all the privacy lessons 15 years ago or more. Watching the whole Facebook thing from the outside only makes me happier that I didn't join.

I'm interested to see where it all goes next. Classmates.com, then Friendster, then MySpace, now Facebook. It's not like any of these has last more than a few years.
posted by hippybear at 10:13 AM on May 19, 2010 [2 favorites]


It's really too bad that an important issue like this is going to be overshadowed by a poor cherrypicked quote from one participant.
posted by DU at 10:14 AM on May 19, 2010


If you want to quit so badly, why wait until the 31st?
posted by monospace at 10:16 AM on May 19, 2010 [2 favorites]


More interesting, from the non-scientific desk of Zuckerberg:
As the service’s engineers built more and more tools that could uncover such insights, Zuckerberg sometimes amused himself by conducting experiments. For instance, he concluded that by examining friend relationships and communications patterns he could determine with about 33 percent accuracy who a user was going to be in a relationship with a week from now. To deduce this he studied who was looking which profiles, who your friends were friends with, and who was newly single, among other indicators.
33% is pretty low, I'm surprised he didn't get better results.
posted by geoff. at 10:17 AM on May 19, 2010


Is there any reason this can't go into one of the open Facebook threads? Like the one dealing with essentially the same topic from two days ago? Flagged.
posted by Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese at 10:18 AM on May 19, 2010


(if only to get some exposure and increase that 6K number)

mefi is not for activism
posted by desjardins at 10:19 AM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]


Yeah, the cool kids might leave fb but for us old farts who are keeping up with farflung friends and relatives, well, it is what it is.

And comparing FB to domestic violence is pukeinducing in its stupidity and ignorance. Just sayin'.
posted by St. Alia of the Bunnies at 10:19 AM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]


There's a reason I don't call sleeveless white-t shirts wife-beaters anymore and neither should you.

I never thought of that. I like 'tank tops' because it's like I'm a walking tank.
posted by fuq at 10:20 AM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]


6,000 people committed to leaving facebook? Yeah, that'll show 'em. Them and the other 4,000,000 users.
posted by Lutoslawski at 10:21 AM on May 19, 2010


You may know someone who’s been in an unhealthy, abusive relationship and yet still can’t bring themselves to break it off…

That would be about half the questions posted to "Human Relations" in AskMe. The answer is always "Dump him/her."

Quit Facebook Day is May 31. Will you be participating?

I can't quite what I never joined.
posted by Doohickie at 10:21 AM on May 19, 2010


(if only to get some exposure and increase that 6K number)

Seconding what desjardins said.

...and Behase's analogy was so controversial I couldn't not use it.

Then please don't complain when people inevitably call it offensive.
posted by zarq at 10:24 AM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]


The other night I tried to get into an open relationship, with myself. It keeps asking you to confirm the relationship and due to the fact that both parties must confirm I was stuck inside an endless loop. I later gave up, I guess it wasn't meant to be.
posted by hellojed at 10:24 AM on May 19, 2010


Are you OK with FB making serious cash on selling even the meager amount of data you hand over to them?

Yes. Why should I care about that? Wal-Mart supposedly takes out life insurance policies on some of its employees. It doesn't strike me as the classiest thing to do, but what do I care if two companies want to make a wager about when I'll die? Same thing here: If I'm not okay with my name and hometown being public, that's one thing. But if I am, then what do I care if one opportunistic company wants to sell it to some other sucker company?

Oddly, they tell me these things via online chat or irc or email, meaning that they already know how to keep in touch with me without me having The Facebook.

Facebook is different. It's not about actively keeping in touch, but passively being kept up to date. Sure, I can keep up with people via email—but that requires a lot more time and effort to do directly on both my part and theirs, and I've got other obligations. I couldn't do it in the same volume with the same frequency, without the shortcut that Facebook provides. I know a lot more about what's going on with family members I don't see very often because of Facebook, and that's really cool.
posted by cribcage at 10:25 AM on May 19, 2010


Zuckerberg sometimes amused himself by conducting experiments. For instance, he concluded that by examining friend relationships and communications patterns he could determine with about 33 percent accuracy who a user was going to be in a relationship with a week from now.

I find this idea super creepy -- I understand that these "experiments" are data related, but the idea of him sitting there cackling to himself while predicting the rise and falls of relationships of real actual people who he has reduced to numbers is kind of upsetting to me; sometimes it's like he's not even pretending to be a real person. I'm not against data and I think there are lots of interesting ways to use that data; if you can actually figure out more about patterns in human relationships, that's awesome, but I think you need to remember that the people involved really are PEOPLE and not just drones plugging in data about their friendships.

I am thinking pretty seriously about deleting my Facebook account for any number of reasons, and I have to say that the idea of Mark Zuckerberg chortling to himself as relationships -- real relationships between real people -- start and end is really not likely to keep me around any longer.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 10:25 AM on May 19, 2010


heh. Just deleted my account, after four active years, this morning. Probably wouldn't have waited, even if I had known about this event. I'm not doing it as a stunt. I just realized that I wasn't getting nearly enough in return for what Facebook was taking from me.
posted by 256 at 10:26 AM on May 19, 2010


Classmates.com, then Friendster, then MySpace, now Facebook. It's not like any of these has last more than a few years.

Everyone I know, pretty much, has joined Facebook- I'm talking my 80-something grandmother, old high school teachers, the works. I don't think that was the case with any of the rest of those sites. That makes me think Facebook will be the default social networking site for a long(er) time.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 10:27 AM on May 19, 2010 [2 favorites]


You know, it's because of Facebook that The Most Serene Republic sends me URLs to exclusive downloads. It's because of Facebook that I engage in a dialogue with the guys in We Were Promised Jetpacks. Neil Gaiman's page sends out some amazing stuff, and following Billy Bragg on Facebook during the recent U.K. elections was absolutely fascinating.

And what do I give up in exchange for this awesomeness? I make it a little bit easier for marketers to tailor their pitches to me. Guess what - I don't care. In the 21st century we are all being marketed to, nearly 100% of the time. Does "advertisers know that I like Neko Case" really frighten anyone?
posted by jbickers at 10:27 AM on May 19, 2010 [2 favorites]


I feel like there's a huge gap between the current, young generation (15-25 years old) and anyone older. I'm in the former category, and people my age—myself included—just don't care who knows what about us.

If Facebook wants to make money selling data about me, more power to them. I couldn't care less who knows what city I live in or what my phone number is, and I can't think of anyone I know who feels differently.

Blame it on being raised with the internet, I guess.
posted by reductiondesign at 10:32 AM on May 19, 2010


I quit three months ago and haven't looked back.

Good thing, lest you be turned into a pillar of salt.
posted by cashman at 10:33 AM on May 19, 2010 [2 favorites]


6,000 people committed to leaving facebook? Yeah, that'll show 'em. Them and the other 4,000,000 users.

I never understand this argument. What on earth does it matter if you are even the only one? You still did the right thing. 4,000,000 doing the wrong thing doesn't change that.

Yes. Why should I care about that?

I could think of a million answers. Here's one that seems only slightly exaggerated, given other recent events: Once corporations de facto own your data, how long until it is de jure as well? And if your data legally belongs to FaceBook, how long until *they* tell *you* what to do with it? FaceBook requires you to take a drug test so that they know the data they are selling to the health insurance industry is statistically valid?
posted by DU at 10:34 AM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]


I'm 25 and for me it's not so much about privacy as it is not being annoyed and consumed with this other new THING I have keep my eye on every few seconds. I've always been an opt-outer.
posted by The Whelk at 10:35 AM on May 19, 2010


I will care about how Facebook treats user data the minute I start paying for Facebook.
posted by Babblesort at 10:36 AM on May 19, 2010


When I realized that the author was talking about facebook in that analogy, I just went WTF and moved down here...


hmmm..what's worse :

Facebook's CEO is an asshole.
Author thinks that Domestic Violence is sort of like having someone know you "like" something you said you like.

yeah, those are a whole lot alike...
posted by HuronBob at 10:36 AM on May 19, 2010


I feel like there's a huge gap between the current, young generation (15-25 years old) and anyone older. I'm in the former category, and people my age—myself included—just don't care who knows what about us.

Every generation feels the same. When they are older, they realize that "what could possibly go wrong" is a rhetorical question.
posted by DU at 10:37 AM on May 19, 2010 [2 favorites]


And if your data legally belongs to FaceBook, how long until *they* tell *you* what to do with it? FaceBook requires you to take a drug test so that they know the data they are selling to the health insurance industry is statistically valid?

Man, talk about a slippery-slope argument. This will never happen.
posted by reductiondesign at 10:37 AM on May 19, 2010


Social networking ProTip: if there are things you'd rather keep private, don't post them on a social networking site.
posted by casconed at 10:37 AM on May 19, 2010


I use Facebook for a few things, but the trick is: I don't tell it *everything* about my life. Nor do I tell any site. You don't have to be either all-in or all-out about it. And for a certain kind of semi-public social communication, it's great.

Don't want Mark Zuckerberg to data-analyze your relationship status? Don't tell him what it is. It's not like he's got the social equivalent of the Google Street View car driving around and snap-shotting everyone's relationships. There's no Facebook Beacon on your junk. If you don't tell Facebook, he doesn't know.

And if they can profit off of the fact that I'm friends with old high school chum and just announced that my apartment smells like cat litter, well, fine. I wouldn't have put that info into Facebook (or Twitter) if I didn't care whether it was public or not.

Besides: Every semi-public piece of info you put online -- anywhere -- someone is trying to profit off of. It's just the way it goes.
posted by chasing at 10:39 AM on May 19, 2010


Are you OK with FB making serious cash on selling even the meager amount of data you hand over to them?

GMail reads private emails in order to better target ads. Is everyone quitting GMail now too?
posted by smackfu at 10:40 AM on May 19, 2010


GMail reads private emails in order to better target ads. Is everyone quitting GMail now too?

I did.
posted by DU at 10:44 AM on May 19, 2010


My god, if my employer ever finds out I belong to the Move it Move it group, I am totally borked.

I use facebook, like it, and enjoy it. So put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Frigging hipsters.
posted by Bovine Love at 10:45 AM on May 19, 2010


GMail reads private emails in order to better target ads.

Cool, I knew if someone built a big enough cluster it would become sentient!!!
posted by Bovine Love at 10:46 AM on May 19, 2010


Social networking ProTip: if there are things you'd rather keep private, don't post them on a social networking site.

They'll still get on there! As has been said numerous times before, it's often friends and family who put your business, relationships, habits, job information and other private or nonpublic information out there. Once you, or rather your data gets caught up in facebook's hands, they've got it, and good luck getting it deleted. Some people (general) really don't understand how information can be used against them, and they just put any old thing out there, pictures, information, associations and other media. Maybe they think they're lost among the crowd and that nobody is watching or cares - without a hit counter many folks think that nobody ever sees their information, or if they do, certainly no one is collecting it or doing anything with it, helpful, nefarious or otherwise. Sometimes it is family members who are clueless. It's also friends and acquaintances who just don't care about privacy - theirs or yours.
posted by cashman at 10:46 AM on May 19, 2010 [2 favorites]


I keep making passes to lock down my privacy settings, but I can't lock down my friends privacy when they talk about me. So the advice to not talk about what you don't want public is kind of useless to anyone with friends.
posted by BrotherCaine at 10:48 AM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]


FaceBook requires you to take a drug test so that they know the data they are selling to the health insurance industry is statistically valid?

What the fuck are you even talking about.
posted by shakespeherian at 10:48 AM on May 19, 2010


Some people (general) really don't understand how information can be used against them

Can you please give me an example or two?

/genuine question, not snark
posted by reductiondesign at 10:48 AM on May 19, 2010


Can you please give me an example or two?

Someone writes on your wall "Hey, great time we had in the waiting room, eh? See ya next week!". Looking at *that* user's history, it's easily deducible that person is HIV+. Suddenly your insurance company drops you.
posted by DU at 10:51 AM on May 19, 2010


Why do people always have to make a big production out of quitting stuff? Just fucking quit, already. Nobody cares and they probably won't notice.

Facebook gives me stuff: Connections with long lost friends, a place to throw some random thoughts, a bit of amusement throughout the day as I comment on stuff. I hide all the crap some of my friends play with, life Farmville or horoscopes or whatever.

What does it get from me? It knows my religion is "snake handler" and my political views are "dirty hippie." If Facebook can do something with that information, so be it.
posted by bondcliff at 10:51 AM on May 19, 2010


Someone writes on your wall "Hey, great time we had in the waiting room, eh? See ya next week!". Looking at *that* user's history, it's easily deducible that person is HIV+. Suddenly your insurance company drops you.

Now explain to me how an insurance company can see my private wall, and how dropping me based on something as circumstantial and based on conjecture as that is legal.
posted by reductiondesign at 10:55 AM on May 19, 2010


I'm keeping my profile. If I don't post anything commercially relevant or pay attention to the ads, I'm a big fat worthless datapoint to facebook's corporate clients. I continue on my way, completely nonexploited, neither bought nor sold AND I get to keep playing facebook scrabble.
posted by The White Hat at 10:56 AM on May 19, 2010


Rules for Facebook:

1. Don't put anything on there you wouldn't want anyone else to know.
2. Don't "friend" someone you don't know and trust.
3. Monitor what people write on your wall, or how you're tagged, etc. Manage your identity.
4. Teach others how public facebook is.
5. Lather, rinse, repeat.
posted by blue_beetle at 10:56 AM on May 19, 2010


I'm with mccarty.tim: if something better and more open like Diaspora takes off I'll be glad to move. In the meantime I'll stick with FB and go through the hassle of battening down the hatches on my facebook profile whenever something changes.

Just yesterday I turned off instant personalization, killed almost all apps still lingering on my profile and made sure that every single set of permissions was set to friends only if anything. It's a pain but it can be done.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 10:56 AM on May 19, 2010


Oddly, efforts like "Quit Facebook Day" seem to have a solo and voluntary structure:

"Yes, I'm going to opt-in and join your database on my own!"
*user types his/her own email into box, with no audience or feedback*

I'm surprised that there's no viral system in place, e.g., "Enter your FB username here, your email address here, and the new social network you're migrating to here... and now, in the 20 slots below, enter the email addresses of the real, I-know-this-person friends you want to encourage to come along with you!

After you sign up, we'll email your friends, so that they can join you in leaving FB and heading where you want to go..."

The obvious way to kill a virus is with another virus.
posted by darth_tedious at 10:57 AM on May 19, 2010


Y'all who are all "Don't say anything on facebook is you don't want your mom/boss to find out about it and everything will be fine" should read this comment by tocts from one of the other open fb fpps.

On preview: reductiondesign, the point is that your private wall isn't private. Facebook can and does and will pull data from it and sell it to other companies.
posted by rtha at 10:57 AM on May 19, 2010


Is Facebook Galacticus Satan Hitler? Or have I gone too far?
posted by Astro Zombie at 10:57 AM on May 19, 2010


Can you please give me an example or two?

/genuine question, not snark

I'm so tempted to write "You are one of those people." Anyway, these aren't too hard to imagine. Every scenario I'm about to post is just pretty obvious.
posted by cashman at 10:58 AM on May 19, 2010


Now explain to me how an insurance company can see my private wall

It's on your friend's wall, your sister's wall, her friend's wall. I thought we just talked about this.
posted by cashman at 10:59 AM on May 19, 2010


Keeping in touch with family and friends: valuable.
Keeping breakfast cereal preferences from The Man: priceless (apparently).
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 11:01 AM on May 19, 2010


Now explain to me how an insurance company can see my private wall

Facebook sold it to them. Or the insurance company has astro-turfers out there falsely friending people so they can suck the data in. Or the insurance company made an app that will just send it to them and you unwittingly installed it.

I don't really know enough how about Facebook to list every possible way this could happen.

and how dropping me based on something as circumstantial and based on conjecture as that is legal.

I don't know about under the recent HIR legislation, but as odious as it would be I'm pretty sure it's legal. And even if not legal, are you seriously under the impression that $MEGACORP couldn't make it look legal on some technicality. "Oh, you forgot to dot an i in sub-paragraph 3, so we had to drop your policy. You can get a new policy but you'll have to follow our join-up procedure which involves an HIV test..."
posted by DU at 11:02 AM on May 19, 2010


Well, I'm confused then. Does our hypothetical wall post say, "Hey, sorry about your AIDS results", or just "Fun night in the waiting room"? I honestly don't understand how my insurance could be threatened with the latter, since there's no detail on why we were even there. "This policy holder took his girlfriend to the ER after she broke her foot—and he was with his HIV+ friend? Drop him." It doesn't make sense to me.

Further, is there any precedent of Facebook selling data for purposes other than marketing, or this all just conjecture of what could be one day? There's a big gap between advertising and insurance fraud investigation.
posted by reductiondesign at 11:04 AM on May 19, 2010


Can you please give me an example or two?

/genuine question, not snark

People have posted pictures of me from stuff like bachelorette parties on Facebook; it's nothing terribly damaging, but there are pictures of me fairly drunk and also smoking. I am a legal adult and getting drunk with my cousin and her friends is not like the hugest deal in the world, but I'll be an elementary school teacher and I'd rather not have 1) my students 2) their parents 3) their older siblings checking around and finding that stuff.

I would never post anything like that and I try to hide my account, but I don't log in very often so I don't always know when policies have changed and my friends will post pictures and link them to me, and that's why I'm probably going to delete my account in the next week or so.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 11:04 AM on May 19, 2010


Also, this is not something that's happened to me, but what if my friend posts "Enjoy your week off -- I know how glad you are to get away from your boss for a while!" and someone at work reads it? Stuff like that can happen really, really easily without any bad intention on anyone's part and I would imagine it could screw up your life a fair amount.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 11:07 AM on May 19, 2010


Why should I quit Friendster? Everyone else is already on here!
I know it's horribly gaudy and has a horrible UI, but no way I'm leaving Myspace! Everyone I know is on this!
I'd love to switch to a better alternative than Facebook, but I can't just up and drag everyone I know to a new social network...

right?
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 11:07 AM on May 19, 2010


If nothing else, FB information could be used for fairly classic grifter scams.

You're at a bar, having a drink, when this person you don't recognize walks up to you. He introduces himself as Joe Smally, saying that you know from earlier in life. He asks about your wife and children, makes some small talk about your job, mentions that concert you went to a few months ago... It certainly seems like he is someone you might have shared an hour or so chatting with at some point. Maybe you ran into him at a conference, and had drinks in the hotel bar?

It's easy to see where the confidence game can go from here.
posted by hippybear at 11:08 AM on May 19, 2010


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