People who use a symbol — a rubber duck or a pair of cats, for example — as their profile photo on Facebook couldn’t be all bad.
That must have been what quite a few recent Facebook users thought when they received friendship requests from people with just such profile photos. They accepted them without checking who they were and thereby got themselves into some unpleasant business. That’s because not every friend request is from a person of a similar age and with good intentions.
When in doubt, reject the request, is a good rule of thumb. Not every person that a user knows fits into every friendship list.
The Facebook profiles with the rubber duck and cats in fact didn’t belong to a bad person. The IT security company Sophos of Mainz, Germany was behind them. It wanted to find out how generous Internet users are with their data.
The answer is they are seemingly quite generous. Almost half — 46 percent — of the 100 Facebook users who were sent the messages added them as friends. Similar to other Internet-based social networking services designed for professionals, friending gives the person access to the user’s profile. The profile is where users have the option to fill in information about themselves such as marital status, hobbies, religious beliefs, political preferences and where they have worked in the past. The information is only a few clicks away and, depending on how thoroughly the user has described himself, can provide a lot of personal data.
Who would be interested in getting listed as a friend or added as a contact by a complete stranger? Often it’s the same people who are interested in gathering e-mail addresses: Spammers.
“Behind these friend requests is an interest in finding out more about you,” said Guenther Ennen of Germany’s federal office for…