Cybersquatting and Social Media 73
Earthquake Retrofit writes "Brian Krebs has a story about cybersquatting on social networking sites. He cites cases of people being impersonated and reports: 'A site called knowem.com allows you to see whether your name or whatever nickname you favor is already registered at any of some 120 social networking sites on the Web today. For a $64.95 fee, the site will register all available accounts on your behalf, a manual process that it says takes one to five business days. Whether anyone could possibly use and maintain 120 different social networking accounts is beyond my imagination. I would think an automated signup service like knowem.com would be far more useful if there was also a service that people could use to simultaneously update all of these sites with the same or slightly different content.' Is it time to saddle up for a new round of Internet land grabs?"
A Schneier blog post earlier this month pointed out a related story about how not establishing yourself on social sites, combined with the frequent lack of validation for friend requests, can provide identity thieves with a tempting target .
Scary (Score:3, Interesting)
multi-update (Score:4, Interesting)
Um...Ping.fm [www.ping.fm]
Wouldn't it be more secure to ... (Score:2, Interesting)
completely avoid social networking sites, rather than playing "whack a mole" by trying to sign up to them all?
I've got a single home page on my own server, which contains minimal personal information. All of my other "home" pages are simply a link back to this page. I don't use social networking sites, as the social network itself is personal information.
Re:Stake your claim (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Stake your claim (Score:3, Interesting)
How does that help prevent people impersonating you?
Re:Scary (Score:2, Interesting)
Sites such as facebook are just another in a long line of silly fads. It will pass, just like geocities.
Banned From Digg via Knowem (Score:4, Interesting)
A word of caution: I used this service and Digg banned my account for "multiple accounts" since my account was created at the Knowem place along with other Knowem users' accounts.
All I wanted was one Digg account under my brand's trademark name and now that name is stuck with a disabled account.
Re:lol (Score:3, Interesting)
Social networking is just a pointless way of giving people you don't know too much information about you.
Exactly. For example, I know for a fact that iwiw.hu (the largest such site in Hungary, with over 2M members in a 10M country) is used extensively by the National Security Office. They actually have a "shadow" version of it, where they connect your relevant contacts to you by hand. Of course, this being "national security", it does not officially exist, and there is absolutely no outside control over it. Pretty fucking scary.
I wouldn't be surprised for something like this to exist in other countries.
Re:lol (Score:3, Interesting)
The key is to prevent things that could be used to identify you from getting out in the first place.
Your name is the basic piece of information someone interested in you will have. There are probably hundreds, maybe thousands of people with the same name, so they need more. A photo. Date of birth. Address. Anything that separates you from your namesakes.
Unfortunately most social networking sites ask for this info, and worse still even if you don't put a photo of yourself up other people can tag you on their photos. That is the worst aspect of Facebook, the thing that pushed me over the edge and made me delete my account.
I came to the conclusion that, in the end, the best thing to do is put out misinformation. It makes it harder for people to find information on you, and even if they do a lot of it will be contradictory. It helps prevent people from googling you successfully, especially if you have a common name. My name, for example, is shared by some religious nutter who is a member of various hard line Islamic groups, so I created lots of random profiles on different sites with the same name, and now if you google it you get more than just me and him on the first page. An image search will pull up lots of random photos I stole from other random people's profiles.
Re:obvious solution (Score:3, Interesting)
So are you going to trademark your kid?
"I don't use any of these sites!" (Score:3, Interesting)
Well "I don't use any of these sites!" you said.
For those of you who didn't go to the website, one of them is Slashdot.
Re:Banned From Digg via Knowem (Score:1, Interesting)
Update: I contacted Knowem by email and ended up speaking with Knowem's co-founder on the phone. He is currently working on working something out with Digg and is trying to get my account restored. He also said that he'd also give me one free month of the subscription service for my inconvenience.
I have never received such a personal response from a website before - it was very pleasant.