Fake Friends

Some of us (myself included) aren't doing our homework.

I've been on Facebook for seven years now, and in that time I've managed to get connected to 370 friends.  Call me old fashioned, but I figure I should at least know someone - or know of them - if I'm going to let them into my Face World. Up until recently that's been my standard, and though it's left me with a rather humble friend count, (given the time frame), I don't have to worry about any of them violating my trust or causing me any sort of cyber-grief.

Lately, however, I've let my guard down a couple of times. Maybe it's because I am, after all, somewhat prone to Friend-Count Anxiety Disorder, or maybe like most of us, I love it when someone young and attractive wants to be my friend.  Either way, my recent lower standard for friend acceptance was based on whether or not the request came from someone who was already friends with the people in my existing network. I was making an assumption that these folks had already done the vetting.  But I was mistaken.


Meet "Millie"

According to Facebook, 55 of my close associates are already friends with Millie. A quick scan of these friends revealed that most of them are middle aged Denver artists, like me. Maybe as a group we are just more accepting, or less attentive to privacy concerns, or maybe it's the titillation of a request from a "hottie." Regardless, 55 of you said yes to Millie, though I highly doubt a single one of you knows her in real life.

Something about Millie never seemed quite right to me, so I didn't accept her overture of friendship when I received it six months ago. But I didn't reject it either. Instead I left her request unanswered in my Facebook inbox, where it sits to this day. Maybe I left it unanswered because I was waiting for Millie to prove she was "real" by showing up in my friend's news feeds. Or maybe It's because I wanted to write this blog and needed it for reference, either way Millie remains unconvincing to me. A glance at her Facebook Timeline reveals no narrative whatsoever, just a handful of boudoir "selfies," each of them with the heads cropped out of the photos, so that we are to assume they're all of the same person. I don't believe it's too grave a violation of good taste for me to categorize Millie as a fraudulent, composite Skank. Call me judgmental.

 

 If you do a reverse image search on Millie, what you'll find is that this stolen picture appears on a whopping 428 separate websites, all of them NSFW (that's Not Safe For Work, for those of you over 50, or who don't work in a cube farm). The origin of this picture is lost in the hall of mirrors of internet image piracy. It's impossible to know anything at all about the girl in this photo. We can't know whether she's a Millie or a Cassidy or a Tiffany. We don't know if she was a paid model or a kid whose picture was hijacked while sexting to her boyfriend. All indications of authorship, origin and intent have been stripped from the photo. All that is left is an artifact of desire. One that keeps on giving, apparently.

 
Meet "Jennifer"

According to Facebook, many of you are friends with Jennifer. Anyone care to vouch for her? I said yes to her request, assuming that she was someone I had recently met at a big art opening. She looked kind of familiar. I figured she would drop to the bottom of my active friends list along with all the other ex-coworkers, friends from high school and distant relatives who never really interact with me on Facebook, but all of whom are technically still my friends. Unfortunately, "Jennifer" had other ideas. One was to message me at 1:30 in the morning recently with four separate messages:

I added you because I liked ur photo.

Have u met any cool people on here?

I have to log off right now

Whats your cell number? I can jus text you right now

I couldn't unfriend Jennifer fast enough, but having awoken from a deep sleep, this normally simple procedure required immense mental effort. The next day I took to Google for a reverse image search, and learned that there are dozens of "Jennifers," "Jessicas," and "Ashleys" all using this same profile picture on Facebook.

This morning it occurred to me that I should check and see if any of my profile pics were being used falsely on the web. So I did a search on the following two images, which have both been used as my profile picture.

Not surprisingly, the one on the left didn't return any results other than the original post on Facebook. It seems the one thing no one is pretending to be on the web is an average looking middle aged white guy. We're more likely the ones doing the pretending.  But the other shot of me below the summit of Mount Yale returned 23 instances of misuse. So as long as you're doing something sporty, exotic or ballsy, people are going to want to steal it. I felt flattered and incensed at the same time.

The moral of the story

Okay, there isn't really a moral. Maybe we should just agree that these are sure some weird times, and there's a whole lot of info we need to collaborate on to help each other stay safe and sane. I suspect we could all use a little Amish-ization every now and then. The Amish aren't against technology per se. They are resistant to adopt any technology that doesn't directly support the strengthening of their communities, or that causes one to be selfish or prideful, or that distracts from the fundamental business of being faithful to God. For them, pretty much everything new and shiny falls into that category. In our world, we've tacitly agreed that participating in social media is critical to our communal well-being. Social media is the new "watering hole" and we can't possibly pull ourselves away from its influence in our culture. The real objective then, is to help each other become as smart as we can possibly be in this big out-of-control social experiment. To that end, I have a few recommendations to help ferret out the Millies.

First, don't assume your friends are any more on-the-ball with vetting friend requests than you are. Make a little effort to figure out if a person seems to be real and trustworthy. An empty timeline is a bad sign. So is a request from a user who just joined Facebook. Consider limiting access for people you don't know well. Facebook allows you control over which friends see what info. Get familiar with your privacy settings. If there's any doubt, don't accept a friendship request from someone unknown. There is no obligation to say yes to a total stranger.  Here is a link to seven critical things you can do to control Facebook privacy settings.
http://www.abine.com/blog/2012/do-your-privacy-a-favor-control-the-7-most-critical-facebook-settings-post-timeline/

Second, consider building a separate Facebook "Page" for your business. Broadly speaking, your Facebook profile is for your friends and family. Pages are for businesses and public personalities. A lot of my friends are artists or folks who operate small businesses. To us, the line between friends, supporters and customers is a fuzzy one. A few folks I know operate their Facebook profiles like Friend Farms, actively requesting and accepting pretty much any friend request, because they are trying to grow a business or increase exposure for their creative careers. Problem is, by design, a Facebook profile is set up to share personal info. If you want a tighter grip on who sees what, you'll have to get pretty granular with your privacy settings. Pages, on the other hand, are set up to provide more filtering and protection of personal info. Most folks find managing both a profile and a page to be a pain in the ass, but if you want to keep your customers out of your living room, and your clients out of your vacation photo albums, then you'll give it some consideration. Also worth mentioning, you're never going to track interaction with a Facebook profile, but pages have built in analytics for every post – something potentially useful if you're actively using Facebook to reach customers.

Third, get in the habit of doing some research. Reverse image searches can help you discover if something is amiss with someone's image usage (or one of your own!). There are several search engines offering reverse image searching, but Google is by far the most powerful. Bookmark this link, or better yet, keep it open in a browser tab.
http://images.google.com.
To understand how Google image search works, click here.

While you're at it, bookmark Snopes.com, a go-to site for hoax busting. There are other sites useful for putting the kibosh on internet hoaxes, but Snopes is the granddaddy of them all, and since many hoaxes circulate for years and years, it's good to have a "granddaddy" to reference. Also, Snopes is useful to keep open while you're on Facebook, particularly during election time. It can help defuse needless hostility caused by images with bogus facts and figures like this much-shared classic:

Read the Snopes debunking of the info in this graphic

Lastly, don't forget how easy it is to unfriend someone on Facebook. Go to your Friends list in Facebook. For each person on the list there is a "Friends" button to the right of their picture. Hover over it and you'll get a pop-up menu. Scroll to the bottom and select Unfriend. That's it. They won't get a notification, you will simply not show up in their friend list anymore. Welcome to passive/aggressive friends management at its finest!

Certainly there's more you can do, short of swearing off Facebook entirely, to protect your personal information.  I'm not overly paranoid with this stuff so I've just mentioned a few things that are top of mind. You may have additional strategies. I've gone back to playing it safe with the friend requests for starters.

Be safe. And say hi to Millie, if you see her.