The other face of Facebook

The fine print of Facebook’s end-user agreement, ignored by many, hides several uncomfortable facts. Unaware of these, users handover information they might otherwise be careful not to post elsewhere. For instance, the button is named “delete” but Facebook retains a copy of any photograph or content you post on your profile

Facebook can give any unsuspecting, well meaning user a rude shock. Young women aged 18 to 22 are more likely to be victims of FB abuse. With over 50 per cent of engineering students in India undergoing this harrowing experience, the trend of “facebooking” may not be such a delightful experience after all.

Riding the tide of social media, many youngsters have chosen to splash their personal lives all over their accounts, with some casually including even intimate details about their daily lives in their posts. The “wealth” of information thus available has led to a meteoric rise in Facebook crimes over the past few years. These include not only defamatory cases but also instances of cyber bullying and identity theft.

S Jai Ram, Cyberabad Assistant Commissioner of Police (Cyber Crimes), says social media crimes have spiked by 40 per cent in the city in the last one year alone, the main reasons for these crimes being personal and emotional. “We receive several kinds of complaints against social media crimes.

People with pent up frustration and jealousy grab private and intimate content from their victim’s accounts and threaten to post them or sometimes even publish them without intimation to the dismay of the unsuspecting user. The abuser or blackmailer is more often than not a close friend or a former lover of the victim.”, he adds. “It takes 48 hours to a delete a malicious or a fake facebook profile but we need close to 30 days to trace the culprit behind the act”, says Jai Ram.

Fake Facebook profiles are common, where the creator uses photographs hacked from another account to run the fake profile. In such instance, he/he may not even know the victim. Also there are certain malicious facebook groups that morph or display photographs in fake account to initiate intimate conversations or make sexual offers to other users.

The fine print of Facebook’s end-user agreement, ignored by many, hides several uncomfortable facts. Unaware of these, users handover information they might otherwise be careful not to post elsewhere. For instance, the button is named “delete” but Facebook retains a copy of any photograph or content you post on your profile. Facebook accounts can never be permanently deleted except by the company itself. A copy of the account still lies with facebook after the so-called deletions. Moreover, hackers are always on the prowl for deactivated accounts as their passwords are kept intact.

“Despite the rising number of social media crimes, most youngsters refrain from taking it to the notice of the police.”, says Jai Ram. “They’d rather approach private hackers to deal with the criminals. But this can prove to be a major disadvantage for them since the criminal would never be caught and they are safe only until he creates another account with their information again.”

“Unlike before, it’s not easy to hack a facebook account now as the company has changed its privacy settings. But there are other techniques to deactivate fake accounts, which are not always fool proof”, says Santosh, a private hacker who claims to have deleted 15 fake accounts till recently. “Scared victims usually delete the content in a hurry. But they instead have to save URLs and screenshots of the content so the culprit can be traced”, he adds.

Psychologists believe that posting pictures of valuables both movable and immovable can provoke criminals. Similarly posting pictures of activities and friends may amuse friends but also make someone jealous. “It is better to have strict private settings for facebook profiles. Controlling what others see in profiles will help the users to not only stay connected but also improves their mental status”, says Arpita Sharma, a clinical psychiatrist.

By:Vaishnavi Girish