More Privacy Concerns for our Youth: Fake College Facebook Groups
posted by Danielle Citron
Today’s youth routinely reveal their intimate secrets online. As Alessandro Acquisti’s work demonstrates, college students share an extraordinary amount of sensitive personal information on social networking sites, blogs, and other Web 2.0 platforms. In response, parents, professors, and job advisors urge students to think carefully before posting their lives online as their data may live forever, indexed and stored in some computer cloud for future employers and clients to see. In the end, however, students determine the path of their online lives, no matter how unwise their present decisions may ultimately be.
Emerging threats to privacy not only emanate from questionable individual choices, but also from third parties’ fraudulent conduct. Recently, individuals set up hundreds of fake Facebook Groups for next fall’s incoming freshmen. Groups bore names such as the University of Michigan – Class of 2013 and The Official Cornell University Class of 2013! . Those establishing the Facebook Groups had no legitimate affiliation with the universities or incoming freshman class at the hundreds of universities for which they had created groups. According to cNet, a recruitment specialist at Butler University identified the problem after seeing the same names–Patrick Kelly, Justin Gaither, James Gaither among others–appear repeatedly as the administrators of the many Class of 2013 groups. A company connected to these groups has admitted that it used fake aliases in setting up the groups. A spokesman conceded that the company “w[as] not upfront about [its] affiliation and intentions to the members of the groups.”
Although the company claims that it is now dismantling the Class of 2013 groups, one can imagine the hordes of personal data that it has aready gathered. And this perpetrator is likely a small fish in a very dirty pond–those assuming misleading pseudonyms to obtain personal data for financial gain, whether it is for marketing or to increase the receipts of identity theft rings. Such fraudulent conduct to obtain personal information may be difficult to detect and the perpetrators more difficult to catch, unless they lack sophistication, which clearly seems to be the case here. Serious care is required in choosing online college friends.
January 13, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Posted in: Privacy (Consumer Privacy)
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Responses (2)
Kyle - January 19, 2009 at 11:09 pm
this story is so overblown, get a life dude. its FACEBOOK. LOL
raj singhaniya - May 1, 2009 at 6:33 pm
ICFAI suchitra centre hyderabad is fake college.
they have no documents to proove it legal.
1500 students are in big trouble
PLEASE HELP US
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