The Dangers Of Bebo and MySpace!
The Dangers Of Bebo and MySpace! PART II
Over the past 6 or so months, online “friend” sites such as www.myspace.com and www.bebo.com have taken the world by storm with MySpace.com recently notching up it’s 47th million user which is one of the reasons why it grew by 609% within in the last year! The service that the majority of them offer is the ability to upload pictures to your very own profile page where you can also add your own biography and list the things that you are interested in. People access your profile by adding you as a friend. Friends can leave comments about each other in what has recently become an over-glorified popularity contest.
With many people desperate for all the friends they can get, they will accept invitations from complete strangers just so their friend count will increase by one. This is where alarm bells start going off in my mind! Yesterday I signed up to bebo.com and imported all my contacts from my Hotmail.com account, the vast majority of whom I’ve never met and many being people I haven’t spoken to in years. This morning, a mere 24 hours later, I checked the site and saw that many people had accepted my invitation for “friendship”. I was looking through everyone’s profiles and noticed that about 60% of people had entered in their Mobile phone number and their full address! Oh dear!
Now try and remember that I don’t know a lot of these people and they don’t know me either yet all of a sudden I had access to their mobile phone number, full address and their pictures! This really is a disaster waiting to happen! If I wanted, I could cause havok! I could innocently sign them up to receive spam by mail or register them on ringtone sites resulting in them wasting credit. They’re just innocent ideas, if I were a paedophile or a pervert then I could use their address for a lot more malicious purposes. I really hope that that won’t be the case but I can’t help but feel that in this day and age, my fears could become a reality!
I really don’t want that to happen so I’ve embarked on a mission to expose these dangers. I thought about it for a while and I decided that the best way to do this would be to actually pose as a 19 year old stunner from the USA who now lives in Ireland
First I created a new email address: tracy.xox@gmail.com. I’ve already cut a corner because gmail.com isn’t yet open to the public so some guys might be a bit suspicious over how i managed to get a gmail.com address. At the end of the day though, I was just too damn lazy to go through hotmail’s longwinded signup system! Once I created the email address I had to search for a picture so I typed in “prom” into google images and picked the photo of the most beautiful girl on the page. I chose to use a prom photo because the story goes that I was a prom queen last year in New York (my hometown naturally) and this way if someone asks me about New York I can make up some bullshit answer and they’ll be none the wiser. After signing up I made up a half believable story about my life thusfar and entered in a few things that I like and dislike.
This is the stage that I’m at at the moment. Just to let everyone know that my goal isn’t to deceive people, instead it’s to make people aware of the potential danger. It’s the prove that people throw all sense of judgement out the window when they are desperate for friends and I reckon that in the next few days I will be well on the way to proving it because “Tracy’s” story isn’t solid. It’s full of holes that will become blatantly obvious to everyone once they find out that Tracy isn’t real. However if someone wanted to, they could pay a lot of attention to detail and make sure their story is rock solid!
I’ll let everyone know how this experiment turns out and if you want to check out my progress, check out Tracy’s Bebo page @ http://Tracyxox.bebo.com
YOU CAN SEE PART II of this report Here
tagsbebo, myspace, danger, identity theft, paedophile, pervert, social experimenttags
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You’re currently reading “The Dangers Of Bebo and MySpace!,” an entry on Adams Rants
- Published:
- 09.02.06 / 4pm
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- Bebo
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