Facebook to Alert Users about Impersonation and Fake Accounts
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| Mashable |
Now that it's considered illegal to make a fake account for someone you know and possibly cause them trouble it makes perfect sense that Facebook are testing a feature that could alert you to that fact. At the moment unless someone tells you or you stumble upon the account yourself, you could never know and that could have a negative impact on your life.
This new feature looks at accounts that use the same name, photos and personal information of a user. The process is automated and one user will be sent a message saying that someone is possibly pretending to be you. You can choose to confirm that yes, they are pretending to be you or you can say they aren't. This sounds like a great idea but it makes you wonder how neatly it will work. If someone creates a fake account before the actual person joins the site, who will get the notification? Probably the user on their first so it could still be a problem. There is a team who looks at all the flagged accounts still though so if there is an issue, there are people you can contact and you shouldn't get notified every time someone with the same name as you creates an account, but since this is still in the early stages, that could still happen sometimes.
The other thing they're hoping to do with the notification settings is allow users to report intimate images that are posted by confirming they are in that picture. This could hopefully stem the tide of revenge porn as users can prove with their name and other photos that someone has put this picture up of them that they do not want online. This is a good use of the feature and doing so will also bring up links to local services that could help a victim of such a situation. In a way this is similar to the suicide prevention tool so you can tell that Facebook is at least trying to do some good for their users.
Finally Facebook are pushing a photo check feature to be tested which works similar to their privacy dinosaur. Users will be shown how to check the privacy settings specifically on their photos so they can make sure that private photos aren't made public and so on.
It's nice that Facebook are making their own effort to stem the tide of fake accounts and unwanted pictures being leaked but is it enough? They claim there isn't really much of a problem of impersonation on Facebook and yet they've put this into place? Either they need to start admitting that something is wrong or other services need to try and put something like this into place but perhaps without the whole real name policy.
Rosina is a Songbird rookie with a degree in Creative Writing. She's trying to focus on her novel on the side but is hoping that Content Writing will turn out to be a good career choice in the mean time! Follow her @Songbird_Rosina
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Facebook to Alert Users about Impersonation and Fake Accounts
Reviewed by Unknown
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Thursday, March 24, 2016
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Reviewed by Unknown
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Thursday, March 24, 2016
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Unknown
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