If you’re on Facebook, love them or hate them, you’ve likely heard of games like Farmville, Mafia Wars and Zoo World. If not, your kids have heard of them. These mini versions of simulators are all applications that are used by a whole lot of people – think tens of millions. If you use these applications, you may have found that there is something a little shady going on. According to blogger Deb Manzella, if you’ve tried to log in recently, you’ve probably noticed that you can’t play the games unless you agree to provide the application with your email address.
These “Ville” applications are not the only ones that capture personal information. In fact, before you install pretty much anything on Facebook you get a message stating that the application has permission to take information from your profile and your friends list that it supposedly “needs in order to work.” You will also find that Facebook can connect with the address book on many popular email programs in order to suggest friends for its members. They may not know that this is so.
Manzella stated that, thanks to this “helpful feature,” she was invited to be friends with both her divorce lawyer’s paralegal and her plumber. If you think about it, Facebook is a total gold mine for identity thieves. It’s basically a huge database of personal information – from millions of people all around the world. If identity thieves can find a way to exploit it, they certainly will not hesitate.
Using applications only makes your information more widely shared, especially when you invite friends to use the application too, and they invite their friends, and so on and so forth. The best thing you can do for your personal information is to not use any of these games, no matter how much fun you think they are or how badly you think you’re missing out by not playing them. It is simply not worth the risk.
Also, be careful what you share in general and who you decide to connect to. It’s probably not wise to connect with your orthodontist’s friend’s uncle, even if you both have the same taste in music. If you insist on connecting to anyone and everyone, delete all personal information from your profile, including your address, your birth date and your email address. Also, be careful what you post publicly. You don’t want strangers knowing where you work or where you’ll be this Friday night.
Hopefully, it won’t be playing Farmville.