Only a week a go, I didn’t care much for Bebo. I wasn’t even that active a member. Yet on the rare occassion that I found myself looking through my ‘friends’ profiles, I caught sight of someone Home Address. That person was almost unknown to me and was only in my friends list because I had previously imported my contact list from MSN.
From that moment on I wanted to try and make a difference, so I set about trying to make it happen. At first I didn’t know how but soon I had a few ideas floating around in my head which began to materialise in the form of Tracy - a totally ficticious girl that I created coupled with a photo of a hot babe. I then set about adding “friends” by using a quick work around I found (joining one of the many colleges). Once I had some friends added I was able to view their profiles which included their contact details. Out of the initial 6 friends that I added, I managed to obtain 1 home address and 4 phone numbers.
At this stage I wanted my findings to get some well deserved publicity as initial comments from my friends were quite positive. I added the article to www.digg.com and www.scooop.net with the result being a massive influx of curious visitors from around the net. The article had also been linked to from various forums and was quickly indexed on google.com meaning that my article was ranked highly when anyone searched for “Bebo”. While all this publicity was welcomed, it still didn’t take of the minor detail that the people who are unknowingly making their personal information available to the public didn’t know the dangers about doing it. That was where my next challenge lied.
I figured that sending messages to the 10 people that I had fooled wouldn’t cause any shockwaves that would reverberate through the Bebo community so I decided to think on a more epic scale. If this was going to work then I was going to have to add more people in order to let Tracy go out with a BANG! After individually clicking 93 boxes belonging to my “mutual friends” I had finally reached a point where enough was enough! Within minutes people started to accept my invitations. Now because I added so many people that don’t know me, people were bound to ask questions and I did get a lot of comments asking who I was, but because they left comments it meant that they had already accepted the invitation rendering their suspicions useless because I had access to their personal details. I reckon if they truly were suspicious then they would have sent me a message beforehand. With Tracy being ever so popular by having close to 100 friends, I realised that the potential for adding literally thousands more “mutual friends” to the list was massive. I was dissapointed to see that I was now unable to access the “Friends Friends” panel because I had more than 30 friends and I was greeted to a message stating that after 30 friends, the list would just be stupidly long and almost never ending! Fair Enough. This meant that I was no longer was able to quickly add numerous amounts of people so at this point I decided that what friends I had would do.
So I added up my friends and discovered that 75 had accepted my invitation. I then added up the amount of invitations that were sent out and ended up with 147 which means that 51% of invitations were accepted. However that can’t be a conclusive figure because some people may still have to check their email and see the invitation so I’m going to place the figure at around 60% of sucessfully accepted invitations!
I then added up the sexes of each of my “friends” and found that 39 were female and 36 were male. So it can be said that 52% were female and 48% were male which is a figure I was quite surprised at because I was expecting guys to be more inclined to accept an invitation from a sexy girl like Tracy. However those figures could just be down to me sending more invites to females but unfortunately this can’t be accurately tracked OR maybe the figures are correct and therefore may potentially backup the idea that girls are more desperate than guys for popularity when it comes to these social networking sites.
Now to the part that I think everyone is keen to find out about; How many people were “conned” into sharing their personal details with me?” Lets start with phone numbers;
I counted up how many people were showing a phone number (either mobile or work) and ended up with 35 which can be expressed as 46.67% this can be further broken down into male and female sexes. So off I went counting how many guys had their phone number displayed and finally I got 13 (37%) which means that out of the 35 people displaying their phone numbers a whopping 22 (63%) are female!
Now I can understand why people might be desperate and add complete strangers as friends but choosing to display a phone number to them makes me think that they either don’t know their number is visible or are simply not aware of the dangers of having their personal info on the net!
My second last task was to suss out how many addresses. I suspected (and hoped) that not as many people would be stupid enough to put up their address on because when you think about it, if you know a person directly, chances are they know where you live so there shouldn’t be any reason to have your address online. So once again I did my duty and counted out how many addresses were displayed. 21 was the result (or 28%). Once again more girls than boys had their addresses displayed but this time it was a lot closer with 12 girls (57%) and 9 guys (43%) having visible addresses.
The last thing for me to do was inform everyone that Tracy wasn’t a real person. I did this using the mail system on bebo.com. Sending a message to 75 won’t have any remifications on the rest of the bebo.com community so I also created a message on my real account and forwarded it to all my friends in the hope that it will continue to be forwarded. Lastly I contacted the Bebo.com owners in the hope that they will take on board some suggestions that I made to them.
I think that pretty much brings this report to an end. I suppose I take this opportunity to apologise to anyone who felt deceived but at the end of the days thats exactly what happened - you were deceived! I’ll leave you with a summary of I learned:
Total Amount of Friends: 75
Amount of Friend Inivitations Sent out: 147
Percentage of Invites accepted: 60%
Number of Female Friends: 39 Percentage: 52%
Number of Male Friends: 36 Percentage: 48%People Displaying Phone Numbers: 35 Percentage: 46.67%
Males displaying phone numbers: 13 Percentage: 37%
Females displaying phone numbers: 22 Percentage: 63%People Displaying Addresses: 21 Percentage: 28%
Males displaying addresses: 9 Percentage: 43%
Females displaying addresses: 12 Percentage: 57%
tagsbebo, myspace, danger, bebo danger, myspace danger, identidy theft, paedophile, pervert, social experimenttags
HU THE FEK WORKS THE PRECENTAGE OF THE GIRLS AND BOYS IN THERE LIST DUDE IVE BOUT FORTY LETS SIT AND COUNT THEM ALL RITE DOWN THERE NUMBERS AND ADDRESS AND BLOODY STROKE THEM…
PREVERT
wack stuff
Hey, I would just like to sayit is very interesting what you have done - well done! I myself have no contact details on my profile, or my school that i am in now. I find it shocking the amount of friends i have which leave there numbers and addresses on it, when they have lots of random people as friends. Oh i also have my birthday on my profile, but i am sure that wont lead to much harm! Well done again, Sophie
really , its not a big dedal, who gives a toss
Well it’s not a big deal anymore because they have removed the contact details box after word spread about my experiment.
We did make a change regarding this. Bebo started of soley as a contact sharing website and morphed into a fully blown social network. When it was contact sharing people would only connect with real friends, but as you found once it became a social network people were less ‘fussy’ about who they connected with. The change we implemented means that even after you are a friend you now have to explicity go in and check a box next to the persons name that you wish to share contact details with. This effectively gives 2 layers of friendship with different privacy settings. We welcome any suggestions on how to make Bebo better, thanks for the constructive experiment.
Well done, I was wondering about this for a while. Most of me and my friends have Bebo and some of them had their profiles on public and had their addresses out, by accident i think. I think many peope didn’t realise their address was being displayed, thanks for doing this so there’s less worry!
wow 2 much freetime dere man…like did u seriously add up all da percentages like??who has time 4 dat or cares
like seriously get off da computer,do sumtin with ur life and stop eating cheeseburgers
jesus i no im like brakin ur balls but everytime i read ur ”rants”i have ta say sumtin
lighten up dude..ya must have way more 2 worry bout den ppl ya dont no acceptin ppl on bebo…
I think having contact data on the web is pretty handy. I don’t see a lot of dangers. Can you explain in this article specifically what these dangers are?
I can come up with something:
- identity theft: I have never experienced this. My signature is not on the web, neither are my pincodes and credit card numbers. Only my phone number and local address. They’d still have to live on this small island to make it at least a bit interesting, or I’d have a huge alibi for anything they try.
- pedophiles: well, being 37 I don’t think they are interested in me
- financial gain: nothing to gain here, LOL
- telemarketers calling me: they never call (this must sound great to some people)
- spam: I do get spam, but I am still able to block about 99%
Of course if you are a kid (say under 16) you’d have to be very careful with so many pedophiles around.
So my contact data is freely available on the web, and then what?
… interestin stuff.
my details r displayed nd so far i havnt been tracked dwn or got any spooky calls frm weirdos but hey u never kno…
Hi Adam,
I am currently writting a paper for a university assignment on the privacy dangers for female youth, through the perspective of bebo. I was just wondering if this blog posting was all you actually wrote - or did you have an extended to text or article that I could get access to. Thanks for your insight.
Elly
Hi! I think it’s cool what you’ve done to show people the dangers of internet blogging! A lady from the government censorship place came to give us girls at our school a talk about the dangers of bebo etc. We learned that just putting your last name or a picture of yourself could be potentially dangerous. It was surprising to see that you could find out the address, telephone number, cellphone numbers, interests, age, gender, email address, what school/college you went to and what time you usually cam back home all in only 20mins of just searching the internet. All of the girls at my school who have bebo and saw this vowed to change their internet blogs.
ur gay
A WANT A BEBO AND IT IS NO LETING MEE
iam a cl boy and my farat sport is football and i lick girls
and my best fraind is nino and branislav and hadi
i billev in god
the ban is emenem
u seriously need a life
January 22, 2008
Adam,
I found your bebo investigation very interesting. I work as a reporter, and would like to have a quick chat with you (anonymously, if you would prefer) this week if possible for an newspaper article I am working on. If you could send me email me at the above address, perhaps i could explain it to you in more detail. Looking forward to hearing from you.
Kind Regards
hi i’ve juz finished claz and passed by to check emails up here on bebo………..but unfortunately its blocked………..so can u guys opened it for us…..or are there any words we might use to have access to it………
ta da!!!!!!!!!