Study shows FaceBook Posses Risk of Identity Theft

In row to already overheated topic currently rocking World Wide Web here comes another news from Sophos PLC, a reputed computer security firm, about company FaceBook Inc. as stated by the computer security firm that 41% users were willing to disclose their personal details to completely unknown strangers, which increases the risk of personal identity theft and online frauds.

FaceBook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly said that the company tracks unusual uses on the part of users and regularly reviews and even deletes accounts created by spammers and fraud people. Chris said that at FaceBook, security is their prime focus and thats why facebook users can control who sees what about themself. According to Chris 20% of facebook users changed their privacy settings from defaults.

Whereas, Sophos PLC created a fake account on FaceBook as ‘Freddistaur’ and invited 200 random facebook users to be added as ‘online friend’. 82 people accepted the request, out of which
72% gave an email address,
78% showed current address or hometown,
23% showed a phone number.

Becoming ones friend on FaceBook typically means that some of their person’s personal details and shared with friends, but it depends upon the privacy selling set by the users individually. But, on general hand basically this is a common problem faced by nearly all social networking sites like Orkut, MySpace, etc.