Your Friends May Not Be Your Friends: The Dark Side of Recent Trends in Facebook

This has been bugging me for awhile now. I wasn't really sure how to word it, or even if anyone else was noticing it, but I was certain there was something bad going on. Turns out, I was right.

For the last while, I was getting numerous Facebook friend requests from people I'd never heard of before. I'd look at their included profile (or what little of it I could see) and there would be even less information included. In other words, I was getting friend invites from people who I didn't know, and I suspect that none of their other "friends" knew them either.

Turns out, these aren't just lonely people trying to make friends. They're spammers who realize that they can no longer get through your spam filters, so they are now trying to friend you and then open a new door to send you lots of information about products you don't want to hear about. Whatever other motives they might have, like trying to get personal information about you so they can use it to steal your identity and make your life a living hell, well, I'm sure no one would ever do that. Especially some anonymous stranger who has sent you an invite and "wants" to be your friend.

Technology Review has an article about this. Which means, if you've seen the article in the trade press, then the issue is already HUGE, which also means that you're probably already a victim. When CNN picks up the story, which is probably tomorrow or the day after, then you can be assured that if you weren't already informed, you will be informed by your bank when they ask you what all these charges in Arumba are for.

Spammers are getting very good at what they're doing, and they have to be, because there are too many programs designed to circumvent their attempts. I have a friend request I put on hold last week from a very attractive young woman who wants to be my friend. She lives in Georgia, and she has about forty other friends, none of whom I know. Her profile picture shows her with half of her shirt missing (on purpose), which I'm sure is quite useful in getting your average male to think to himself, "hey, she wants to be my friend, so maybe I have a shot at that hot chick" or some other stupid thought process. And that's how someone who is a spammer is going to get onto someone's friends list.

But then it gets even more interesting. Because I'm some horny guy that wants to make it with some hot girl half my age who lives on the other side of the continent, I'll probably be stupid enough to accept her friend request. I mean, what can I lost? Well, then she decides she wants to be friends with a lot of my other friends, which she now does by sending out a mass request to everyone on my friends' list. Then they look at it, realize that she's a friend of a friend, so they click yes when they get her request. They figure that by association (she's "my" friend), she must be safe and quite possibly a forgotten friend of theirs. So, she uses this to continue to break her way into the associations that we have amongst our friend networks, until she has managed to exhaust all avenues of connections. But now she has a huge list of people to spam for her products.

Let's now revisit "her", because odds are pretty good that she's not really a she, nor is she actually a person, but a spammer network that is interested in exploiting connective networks. Without any work at all, they let the previous connections of networks do the work for them, and next thing you know, we're all starting to receive strange correspondences. What you will also NOT notice is that her connection to you seems to disappear, going underground. Oh, she's still your friend, but she doesn't make status updates, so you don't remember she's your friend. She's like a sleeper agent waiting for the right moment to strike. And when she does, you'll never even know she did.

This is the type of thing that will probably bring down the usefulness of a site like Facebook because once people realize they're being scammed and targeted by people in their own networks, they'll do what comes natural: Leave. Why stick around an invite future attacks and continued exploitation?

There is much more to this than these basic points, but I'll leave it at that so people can get back to informing me of how many sheep they've found on their farms.

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Spammers Will Spam You, No Matter How Nicely You Ask Them Not To

A few weeks ago, I made the foolish gesture of creating a Craigslist ad in the personal relationships section. I didn't really expect to make a "love connection" but at the same time, I was curious at what type of response I would get. I got lots of responses, but very few of them were actually productive. I had included, as most people tend to do, a desire disclaimer, practically begging scammers to leave me alone, that I was not looking for someone to make me rich, or whatever, but sure enough here's the break down of what I received:

37 Responses
18 Wanting to provide me with sex (requiring me to contact them at their special site)
10 Very interested in my ad, but needing me to register at some sex site for verification (they've gotten tired of "fake people" and "scammers")
4 People who felt they could help me find "love" if I joined some pay site they knew of
2 Actual people who were interested in talking more (neither responded further...must have been the picture I sent them of me in my Disco Suit)
1 Married person who was interested (as long as we didn't tell her husband)
1 Woman with children who seemed interested, but just wasn't sure I felt comfortable with someone else's children just yet
1 Woman who claimed "I know who you are but am not telling you who I am"

That was my response from my personal ad. My stuffed animals have more success at this sort of thing than I do. Hmm, maybe having stuffed animals is WHY I'm not more successful at it than I am. Must reconsider this while playing more World of Warcraft and shopping for a new slide rule before returning to my job at Best Buy.

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The Art of Lazy Science

I'm still in the process of continuing to read Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How they Shape Our Lives by Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PHD and James H. Fowles, PHD, but one thing I've noticed in a tendency of the authors to resort to what I consider lazy science. The book itself is quite phenomenal in its process but its quoting and reference work is atrocious, leaving a lot to be desired. An example is on page 188, where the authors reference Robert Putnam by stating: "These findings contradict some of the core recommendations made by political scientist Robert Putnam and his colleagues who study the effect of "social capital" on the health of our democracy. It then references Putnam's Bowling Alone, but no specific chapter or passage is included. Nor is there any indication as to what colleagues these authors are talking about, especially when they mention a book that was written by one author. They then continue: "Putnam argues that highly clustered network ties improve information flow and increase reciprocity at a societal level because everyone is looking out for everyone else." If they're going to challenge specific arguments made by Putnam and unnamed "colleagues," perhaps the authors should at least give enough reference information for the reader to be able to come to a likewise conclusion.

Another blatant error comes in the next chapter when they start talking about tit for tat game theory, specifically that put forth by author Robert Axelrod. They talk about his cooperative strategy on Page 219, but when they reference him, they reference his work that has never been created, some strange volume called The Evolution Corporation, which they state he wrote in 1984. I am impressed because that means he put that out at the same time he wrote The Evolution of Cooperation, which coincidentally was written in 1984. In other words, someone should have at least edited this book to get the right titles of books they're references, especially when they're using some of the biggies of political science literature. And no, there is no The Evolution Corporation from Axelrod; I checked, just to make sure I wasn't missing a great volume of his and making a really stupid argument against bad science. When your own theory uses Axelrod as much as mine does, it's pretty hard to miss alternative novels written by him during the exact same year (with almost the exact same title and almost about the exact same subject).

Bad science! No cookie!

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If obesity is contagious, why isn't good health as well?

I'm reading an interesting book right now called "Connected" by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler. I'm reading it as background for my Friendship Over Time theory, specifically to explain the process of how cultural adaptation can occur over time as a process of societal change. But what is really interesting for this post is an argument that is made in Chapter 4, which is that obesity is contagious. They cite a bunch of studies and show that over time obesity can spread in groups, and eventually push itself onto outlier connected groups, up to three degrees of separation.

What never made any sense to me in their study was how come this doesn't happen with positive circumstances, like good health? How come good health doesn't spread to three degrees of separation of people?

My guess is that what they are showing is that bad things tend to spread much easier than good thing, much like communication theory shows that it is easier to push a negative message than it is a positive message. In my thesis study, when I was showing that Boris Yeltsin's message of 1991 Soviet Union's past was negative rather than the putsches' message of it being a positive past was easier to push to the public, I think there's something there. Physics shows that chaos theory tends to push disorder rather than order, meaning the universe has a tendency to spread itself out rather than contain itself in order, so why should ideas and concepts be any different?

What this means is that in order to get your friends to all want to lose weight, you have to put serious energy into the central depository of information, meaning that the state of rest for information should be one of "do nothing" and that potential energy is always there to do negative actions, pushing towards disorder, such as gaining weight and leading to less healthy outcomes. In order to turn the message, you need to put energy into the mix to achieve a higher level of valiance of energy states (so that potential energy will yield kinetic energy that leads to positive results).

So mathematically, if you want to achieve better results from your social groups, you have to put in positive energy that is stored as potential energy that can yield kinetic results that spread out to a higher level of order. In other words, energy goes uphill, requiring effort to achieve positive results, while it is very possible that if your goal is negative attributes, your potential energy required is already stored at a state of rest and is just waiting to be released.

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Someone you know is looking for you!

I get these really annoying emails all of the time from spammers that try to look like they're legit. Some of these come from some legitimate sources, like Classmates.com, but they're still spam and they drive me nuts. One of the recent waves of spam messages has been the "Someone you know is looking for you!" Then you click it and it takes you to some social networking or singles site that wants you to sign up so you can "discover" who it is that "might be" looking for you. If you've ever been stupid enough to sign up, you discover that no one is actually looking for you, but now you have another gateway to lots and lots of spam.

So I started wondering: Who would ever be looking for me anyway? I mean, I'm on Facebook, so if someone wants to find me there, that's okay. Some people have. I've found some of my old friends, too. Good thing.

However, I realize there might be "other" people looking for me, too. First off, there are people who want to sell me things. Things I don't need. Things I don't want. But they will continue to send me information telling me how much I need a Viagra pill, penis enlargement surgery or new credit (I honestly think there's a connection between the three, but I'm not smart enough to make that connection). Eventually, they go directly into the spam filter.

Then there are bill collectors. Well, the ones that NEED to find me have found me. Anyone else is pretending to be a bill collector, or is someone I never would have paid in the first place.

Then there's the Army. Yes, the Army still keeps trying to convince me that I should go back into the Army...as an enlisted member. Yeah, right. Like that's going to happen. I'm going to go back into the service, join as an enlisted member this time, take orders from some 23 year old with a BA degree who thinks that BA degree and ROTC training at UCLA makes him a natural leader. My 2 MA degrees, nearly completed Ph.d., numerous BA/BS degrees, combat service and my West Point training really doesn't agree with that supposition. I asked an Army recruiter why I can't go back in as an officer, and they don't really know why the age restrictions were raised to 42 for enlisted but still remain around 30 for officers. That's a nonstarter.

So who else might be looking for me? Ex-girlfriends? Like the crazy one that I still fear might be looking for me? The one that talked about the different ways she would like to dismember the entire male population (where I was affectionately referred to as "the last victim")? The one that sent me an itemized bill when I finally convinced her that our relationship was over? For the record, all of those are the same woman.

So, I'm just not all that thrilled whenever I discover that "someone I know is looking for me!". No, I prefer they not find me. My stuffed animals and I are doing okay without being found.

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Appealing to all can mean losing them all

This idea can easily be used in politics, and I'm sure if someone was intuitive enough that person could take what I say and cross apply it to the election manifestations that are going on right now. But I'm going to keep it simple, based one something that's been bothering me for awhile from a very, somewhat, innocent source.

If you've ever gone to school, and I hope we all have at one point or another, you've probably come across Classmates.com, which purports to be a resource to get people back in contact with their school mates from previous institutions. It's expanded a bit, and it's trying to appeal to be a social networking site for a lot more than schools, but whatever. Unfortunately for Classmates.com, it is coming up against both Facebook and Myspace, which both are free, and while Classmates charges money for the more useful services it offers (like actually being able to contact someone you want to contact), it has zero chance whatsoever of making people think it is in any way superior to either Myspace or Facebook.

And why is this? Well, one thing that Classmates USED to do well was it would divide up schools by the years you attended them, and then whenever someone else showed up on the site from that school, it would notify you. Well, realizing that the chances are slimmer rather than normal that someone is going to find Classmates.com on a regular basis, so you'd get lots of notices of people in your networks signing on, and showing the system is worthy of your dollars, they decided some years back to lump years together. So, I graduated from Moorpark High School some years ago. Let's just say the date was 1992 (which it was not). I used to get notices about other people from Moorpark who signed up, mainly if they were from the class of 1992. Well, Classmates, trying to make it look like the system is much more used than it really is decided that they'd do something stupid, like lump 1992 into 1990-1996, or something like that. So, now whenever someone from those years signs up, they send me an irrelevant message that doesn't concern me in any way whatsoever. I don't care if someone signed up who was from the class of 1996, but I have to sign on to find out that someone I don't know, or would have ever known, is the person they're notifying me about. So I just stopped using Classmates.com.

But they still send me notices, and I think that's just stupid. They made their own service so useless yet think somehow they've made it more relevant.

Which brings me to Facebook. I hate when someone changes something that already works. One thing I liked about Facebook is that when I clicked "Friends" it would show me all of my friends in detail. Now, it shows me JUST the ones who have updated their profiles. I don't care who updated his or her profile. I can find that out if I want. Now, without multiple clicks, I can't get that full detail version anymore. Well, maybe I can, but they didn't make it intuitively obvious.

So, Facebook, trying to appeal to even more people with a new "feature" have dumbed it down to an annoying presentation. So now I don't even sign onto Facebook unless I'm really, really bored, or someone like my friend Kat has signed on and tells me she sent me a message.

Myspace has gotten so annoying over the last few months, I almost feel like canceling the account. I receive invites over and over again from people trying to spam their sex sites. I deny each and every one of them, but it requires me to sign onto my Myspace account just to find out Tina is not the Tina I knew from high school, but some 19 year old slut who wants to sell me pictures of her going at it with a vibrator. When are these people going to realize that most of us just aren't interested in this trash? If someone's paying for this stuff, I guess I understand how they spam everyone hoping for success, but I can't believe anyone is that stupid to pay for that kind of crap. And if it WAS the Tina I knew it high school, I'd feel even worse, kind of like the feeling you'd get going to a strip club and seeing a dancer who turns out to be a close friend you lost contact with because she was having trouble paying bills and had to "take another job to pay her bills". Yeah, I guess one can say something about going to a strip club in the first place, but there was a time back when I was going to San Francisco State where I was dating a woman who worked at one of the very popular strip clubs in San Francisco, so I used to pick her up at work, and you'd be surprised how many women from school I used to run into who were "paying their way through college". It's kind of sad, actually, but that's not the point of today's memo.

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