Martin Koss – thinking out loud…

It’s been with us for a couple of months or so now and I’ve been monitoring the effect it has had on what once was our ‘Fanning’ antics – and there’s been some worrying activities emerging now that the universal ‘Like’ button has gone ‘mainstream’.

And you know what?

I’m becoming less of a ‘fan’ of the universal ‘like’ button everyday.

‘Clickjacking’ has taken on many forms recently and the most common version I’ve seen (there are many) is when a friend ‘likes’ some app that dives unrelentingly into your friends list before you get chance to click away.

You show me yours before I show you mine

I think a ‘snapshot’ feature (like you get at Bing) would be a good thing here on FB, so we can get a preview of what a friend just ‘liked’ …before we click it.

why…? I hear you asking.

Well think back a few months and if you saw a friend had become a ‘Fan’ of something, you were fairly safe to click the title and see what your friend just became a ‘Fan’ of.

It was relatively safe because (a) you knew it was something on Facebook, (b) we weren’t being bombarded with so much ‘trickery’ by apps and (c) becoming a ‘Fan’ did not apply to apps or any external content.

It was safe.

Now, with the ‘Like’ button being used within Facebook, on external websites & blogs and (the worst bit) on Apps and spammy content – and the amount of ‘clickjacking’ going on – do we feel safe clicking on something a friend just ‘liked’? I don’t.

For all we know, our ‘friend’ didn’t ‘like’ the thing at all.

It’s not going very well for Facebook right now is it? And I dread to think what they can do about it. With the introduction of ‘simpler’ privacy settings you’d think they were putting a few things right but what about all the tricksters? Is there a privacy setting for that? Yes we can ignore 99.9% of what we see in the news feed but isn’t that defeating the whole objective of Facebook?

What do you think?

Have you been tricked by the ‘Like’ button yet? Have you clicked on a link when you read, in the Facebook ‘news feed’ that a friend of yours ‘Liked’ something just to find you were off on a jolly to some scammy website or you’d been hoisted into some app that insisted you divuldge all your prvate details in order to view some ‘secret’ video? Perhaps you’ve acidentally clicked a ‘Like’ button yourself just to find your entire friends list was raided and you were left with egg on your face while your friends started shouting at you for inviting them to some scammy FB app?

 

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