Many Facebook users would love to know who in their social circle has blocked them or removed them from their friend list. For probably good reasons, Facebook doesn't have a way of telling you who has decided they don't want to share information with you via the social network anymore - but there are plenty of users who would love that functionality to satisfy their curiousity.
Scammers, of course, aren't slow to take advantage of an opportunity like this - and you should be careful of giving third-party applications which make claims that they can help you tell who has defriended you access to your account.
Here's an example of an application that is live on Facebook right now.
The application, called "Who doesn't like me", claims it will
regularly check your friends to see if anyone has removed you. When it detects that someone has removed or blocked you, a message will popup informing you who it was and a link to there (sic) profile.
However, be on your guard because if you decide you want the application it will ask your permission to scoop up information from your Facebook profile, and even send you messages at your private email address.
Do you really want to give an unknown Facebook application such access?
And if you do decide to proceed, then an all-too familar survey scam hosted by CPALead will pop up, earning revenue for the scammers by tricking users into taking pointless surveys.
If you find yourself in this situation, please don't take the surveys. You're only encouraging the scammers to distribute even more of these scams.
Instead, check your application settings and revoke access to all rogue applications.
You should also check that your own Facebook newsfeed hasn't started pumping out adverts, promoting the scam:
If you want to learn more about security threats on the social network and elsewhere on the internet, join the Sophos Facebook page.
Hmm....the new layout is fine...but I can NO longer find Chesters' blog...
Is it stilll "here" ? And if so what is the link...couldn't find it using any nav I see nor via your search either...
Chester? Hello...you there lad?
:-)
Jim
Chet's still here! He just hasn't blogged for a few days. :) You can find Chet's content at http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/author/chesterwis...
Howdy!
I've been traveling and had some rather unfortunate experiences with an airline who recently acquired United... :) I'm home and looking forward to posting on our shiny new blog. Thanks for asking!
Chester
What about the opposite--the apps that promise to tell you who has visited your wall? How do they work, and where would they be getting that information?
Hi Kathryn. You want to be very cautious around any apps that claim to be able to tell you who has checked out your Facebook profile. Read this piece that I wrote earlier this year about that. http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2010/10/11/viewed...
Hope that helps.
Thanks--I figured you'd probably already written about it, but was being lazy! Very interesting--and even worse than I assumed it would be!
I believe it is actually against the terms-of-service to develop apps that track visitors or expressly notify you that someone has stopped following you (when I started using facebook, I had been on myspace where "profile logger" applications were starting to appear. Since I was curious about the FB programming platform, I looked into it. In some ways, it is technically possible, but not guaranteed to be reliable. Then I found the explicit mention the the TOS and gave up on the idea)
OTOH, doing this yourself (with, say, a greasemonkey script or similar) is quite possible - you just need to do what the app claims to do - capture (screen-scrape) your list of current contacts in facebook, and scan for missing entries.
(in theory, this can be done manually; in practice, only if you have fewer than, say, 100 contacts...)