Facebook's Spam Problem

It was only a matter of time before hackers, 'sploiters, and evil-doers figured out how to use Facebook to take advantage of the rest of us through Facebook-spread malware.

As Facebook begins to steal market share away from email as a primary mode of online communication--links that used to be emailed are now shared on walls--malicious programmers have updated their tactics to reflect the shift.  Particularly abusive in the past few days have been links offering users the chance to see pictures or videos of bin Laden's death.  Unwary Facebookers click on the link, are invited to allow an app access to their information, and boom: the phony link is rebroadcast out to all their friends.

This chain of events should not be unfamiliar.  Email experienced the same problems in its early years.  While I admittedly was a bit too young in the early-to-mid 90s to fully understand the concept of email spams and viruses at the time, the parallels seem obvious.  One of two things must happen for the tide of spam and viruses to stop:

• Facebook users have to get smarter and stop clicking the links.

As we've seen throughout the history of the internet (mankind?), this is the lesser likely of the two solutions.

• Facebook must put filters into place capable of stopping these messages before they get to users walls.

This is the more likely of the two scenarios, but unlikely in the short-term.  In the early days of the technology, proprietary email servers had very little in the way of spam protection.  Even AOL, the nation's largest provider of internet services for some time, did not have great spam filters until long after it was irrelevant as a service.  Gmail does a great job of protecting its users from spam and viruses, which is one of the things that has lead to its widespread adoption.  However, Gmail offers a wrinkle that Facebook will probably never provide: customization.  In Gmail, I can mark certain email accounts as spam so that I never have to see them (for example, the mandatory J. Crew emails that I receive in order to get 10% off in-store go straight to my spam folder).  Facebook, however, does not want messages from companies and brands to be filtered out.  The entire value of Facebook to companies, outside of ad networks, is the ability to segment and communicate with their customers effectively.  I can hide posts from a certain users, but currently this option is hidden and unintuitive.  Facebook has an active incentive to not filter the types of content that users receive in their news feeds, because this is part of its value proposition to companies.

The more and more I think about it, the more I become convinced that social networking, at some point, might replace personal email.  The more popular Facebook gets, the more incentive there will be for hackers to program malicious viruses to steal information and compromise security.  Unless Facebook can stay one step ahead of them and begin protecting users' news feeds from these sorts of attacks, they may one day find themselves in the same category as AOL: forgotten tech giant.

and when you said i couldn't save you enough, i started giving you up, i started giving you up