Just as I had thought, it’s not just me who thinks that the countless import tools we have scattered here and there across the Web. Same goes on Facebook’s contact import tool. So what exactly is bad about it? The marketers can tend to utilize the contact import tool to expand their own list. Why? Obviously to randomly mail people on the list.

Isn’t this been happening for quite a long time already? Obviously but hunting down Facebook is perhaps the growing popularity of the social network that currently has 260 billion pageviews a month. And as I mentioned earlier in the post on Facebook Community Council where the need to give users the ability to keep check on anything that goes against its terms of use. Here the issue is with the fear that Facebook’s Friend Finder can be used for such malicious activity. Andrew Noyes of Facebook speaks to protect the feature stating that the team puts up hard work to exercise control over any such malicious activity on the social network. I would like to quote Max Klein on the issue:

A  marketer could take a list of 1,000 e-mail addresses, either legally or illegally collected — and upload those through a dummy account — which then lets the user see all the profiles created using those addresses. Given Facebook’s ubiquity and most people’s reliance on a single e-mail address, the harvest could be quite rich.

This is quite an issue to be addressed promptly and users should know of it, given that it is totally different from the privacy settings that you have from where you can actually block Facebook Search from having you included in the results. These marketers would use a fake account on the Friend Finder and perform a search to find useful information about users like their names, genders and their location. Now the profiles are definitely blocked from being accessed but they will tend to have quite a chunk of it already to make use of. Other than that the major issue why Facebook might actually have trouble protecting is the fact that many of the users aren’t really aware on how to utilize the privacy settings.

I will state it again, each user has to take some time out and actually learn how important is their privacy and how they can tweak theirs to keep themselves protected. On the other hand, I might sound skeptic here, but the amount of data each user is throwing up;using those apps on the social network is more than enough for any clever marketer out there. Which in short means that in order protect yourself more, users should actually try and ensure that they don’t spend so much time using those applications. It’s just an advice, one quite worthy to be taken.

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