The article was written for anyone who uses Facebook, which is generally people between the ages of 17 & 25 (according to one of my journalism professors). As a journalism major, I believe this article's point of view is slightly biased. Although the article includes some quotes from Facebook, its overall tone is negative. The writer, Ryan Singel, even chimes in with his opinion when he refers to Facebook as a potential "hijacked social network." He also states that Facebook "downplayed the attack."
I don't agree with Singel's point of view. Before Facebook hackers could ever turn users into into a "powerful zombie army that can attack other websites or scout for vulnerable sites on the net," via Facebook applications, the application would need to be quite large - we're talking millions of users. I also have to believe that Facebook would start monitoring each application's source code much closer if this were to start happening more often. I have a question: does the "hijacking" they're talking about in this article work like an internet spyder, like we talked about last class? Would it gather information from other Facebook application users' computers? Whatever the case, I'd give Facebook the benefit of the doubt!
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2 comments:
I'm glad to see you employing your skepticism. Although quite possible, in my opinion such scenario of a Facebook zombie army sounds more panicky than realistic. This will be an excellent article to bring up when we get to privacy and security on the Internet.
I use bumper sticker all the time, so this is kind of scary! I think that it would be a huge needle in a haystack chance that someone would hijack your computer because so many people use those applications but it is still weird to think about! Hopefully facebook will warn users or make their site more secure somehow.
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