Security on Facebook
January 17th 2010 20:21
The other day there was a 'join the fight not to pay $3.99 a month for using Facebook' group you could sign up to on the site. It's hard to know what's real and what's not on Facebook sometimes, so I tend not join anything unless I'm fairly confident of it. There have been a few hoaxes turn up on the site in my reasonably short acquaintance with it, not least, I suspect, the one that was going to give away laptops.
But apparently small-scale hoaxes aren't the biggest concern on Facebook, and there have been a number of security issues in recent months. Maybe these have been focused overseas, as I can't say I've been particularly aware of them here in New Zealand.
The outcome of this is that Facebook has now made a deal with McAfee to provide security for all 350 million or so of its users.
This sounds good, except that the free side of this will only be for six months. After that you'll have to pay for a discounted subscription to McAfee in order to keep your virus protection to be kept up.
The hope is that it will stop people's Facebook accounts from becoming compromised by some viral issue. If something does happen to your account McAfee will provide an automatic pop-up offering the user a free scan and repair program next time they log in.
This seems a little odd. It's a slightly bolting the barn door after the horse has escaped approach rather like using acne cleansers once the acne appears. Wouldn't it make more sense for McAfee to do its scanning on a regular basis so that viruses are hit before they affect the customer? Otherwise it just seems to me that it's very much a self-promotion thing by the security company, rather than a proper security underpinning.
At present this option on Facebook is only going to be available to users in the UK, United States, Australia, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, France, Canada, Mexico and Brazil. Additional countries - hopefully New Zealand will be among them, although it doesn't seem to readily appear on the US radar - will come later down the track.
But apparently small-scale hoaxes aren't the biggest concern on Facebook, and there have been a number of security issues in recent months. Maybe these have been focused overseas, as I can't say I've been particularly aware of them here in New Zealand.
The outcome of this is that Facebook has now made a deal with McAfee to provide security for all 350 million or so of its users.
This sounds good, except that the free side of this will only be for six months. After that you'll have to pay for a discounted subscription to McAfee in order to keep your virus protection to be kept up.
The hope is that it will stop people's Facebook accounts from becoming compromised by some viral issue. If something does happen to your account McAfee will provide an automatic pop-up offering the user a free scan and repair program next time they log in.
This seems a little odd. It's a slightly bolting the barn door after the horse has escaped approach rather like using acne cleansers once the acne appears. Wouldn't it make more sense for McAfee to do its scanning on a regular basis so that viruses are hit before they affect the customer? Otherwise it just seems to me that it's very much a self-promotion thing by the security company, rather than a proper security underpinning.
At present this option on Facebook is only going to be available to users in the UK, United States, Australia, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, France, Canada, Mexico and Brazil. Additional countries - hopefully New Zealand will be among them, although it doesn't seem to readily appear on the US radar - will come later down the track.
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Comment by Journeywoman
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Agreed. I'm okay with ads on facebook, but a payment scheme in the guise of "security"? Hell no!
I'd be willing to bet that the McAfee popup will appear on the majority of people's pages, even though only one of my FB friends' accounts has ever been hacked into (and it wasn't even in Australia - he was using a public computer in China at the time).
If this does come to pass, it'll be interesting to see whether people will pay, or if they simply ditch facebook altogether.
Comment by Mike Crowl
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