There are number of Scoundrel Facebook applications which steal your personal data and use them for their malicious purposes, like forcing to take part in surveys, sending you the spam mobile phone messages, e-mails and selling all the contacts database to the unwanted advertisers and so on.
Many of the applications starts by making promise to show some shocking photo / picture or video.
And then, you are redirected to the page for that application where you need to authorize that application by using your personal data.
After authorizing it, the application owner gets full access to your personal information and then they can use it in their way.
The applications also posts link to the same video onto your profile, so that your friends will also get trapped by seeing it.
See the video, displaying the life cycle of Facebook worms live,
Here is the method to stay away from the rogue and malicious facebook apps. :
- Don’t click any of the un-trusted web-links present on the your friends’ Facebook wall. For example : “Hey, I am really shocked! The teacher nearly killed this boy: https://abc.com/shocked – Worldwide scandal!”. Obviously messages like the following aren’t posted by your friends’ but by the rogue Facebook apps. Attracting words are embedded in the messages like hottest, latest, scandal etc., which are enough to think it as a scam / spam message and don’t click on them.
- If you already added some Facebook applications, which you personally don’t trust, then removing them would be a better idea. See how to remove the Facebook applications from your account.
- When you see such type of spam web-links on your friends profile then ask them to delete that post and the rogue application. You can send them link to this page, so that they get aware for the similar issues of data stealing.
It’s nice to create new friends & socialize hence, by using the social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut, Hi5 and so on. But be sure that your personal data is not getting leaked or stolen in any way.
You can share this information to your family and friends, to help making the web a safer place for everyone, with his own privacy.