Facebook: always trying to harvest your personal information:

If you have a Facebook account, you may have encountered the section where a security question is to be set. This is in case of lost passwords or forgotten email accounts. Most websites have something like this, offering a number of questions that include father's middle name, favorite book, first pet, and so on. Sometimes you could create your own security question and answer. In any event, if you wanted to, you could pick a question to answer that didn't in any way identify you.

Now here's the complete list of security questions that you can choose from at Facebook:

• What was the last name of your first grade teacher?
  
• In what city or town was your mother born?
  
• What are the last 5 characters of your driver's license?
  
• What street did you live on when you were 8 years old?

Each of those, to different degrees, help Facebook construct a historical/geographical/orricial-records biography of you. Something, say, that "what is your favorite color?" doesn't.

There are a lot of people out there that try to limit the amount of personal information that they give out. At other websites they can, if they choose, have the security question reveal virtually nothing about themselves. But it's not as simple with Facebook. There, they could enter bogus information to any of those questions, but keeping track of them is a hassle and so they probably acquiesce and end up giving out information they'd prefer not to.

NOTE: You can ignore setting the security question but not too many folks are going to do that. You could never use Facebook, but that's becoming harder to do. Recently, the Los Angeles Times changed part of their website so that you had to have a Facebook account to make comments.


posted by Quiddity at 6/26/2011 01:21:00 AM