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Deceiving Users with the Facebook Like Button

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1–10 of 21 posts

Re: Deceiving Users with the Facebook Like Button

#5
As the author points out, the easy fix is to let users know what they just liked, or ask them to confirm.

Also I suspect this service is fairly self-regulating. Facebook users are generally careful about what they broadcast. The author gives the captcha trick used by porn sites as an example...how many people are going to broadcast their taste in porn?

Re: Deceiving Users with the Facebook Like Button

#6

As the author points out, the easy fix is to let users know what they just liked, or ask them to confirm. Also I suspect this service is fairly self-regulating. Facebook users are generally careful about what they broadcast. The author gives the captcha trick used by porn sites as an example...how many people are going to broadcast their taste in porn?

I see this story come up a lot, but according to reCAPTCHA, it's an urban legend. There is not really any evidence that spammers actually do this at all, let alone do it on a meaningful scale.

Re: Deceiving Users with the Facebook Like Button

#9
post #4

You have to click the button again to remove the "Like" relationship. --- Wow, talk about confusing as hell...

If you notice it when you're still on the page, it's easy. However, as I understand it one would have to go to their facebook page to see this, and it seems unlikely that most users would be doing that (constantly watching their facebook page, not just the homepage feed). If someone is "liking" a lot of pages, then there's also the difficulty of figuring out which pages the spam is coming from - even if it would be possibly to determine through a process of elimination, users would have to remember every page they liked by the time they noticed the spam.

Not a big issue now, but if lots of pages start using this capability, it could become a problem, albeit of a very minor variety.

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