Facebook can become a very useful tool to stay in touch with your friends and to find classmates of past years, thus maintaining the bonds created in school. Unfortunately it is not all roses and flowers: on Facebook we can also receive viruses or spy apps, designed to steal the password or compromise privacy, stealing the information and data of our profile (for advertising purposes or to clone accounts) . How to defend yourself "> prevent data or profile theft. Let's see together what threats we can still run up against on Facebook.
Games and polls app
In recent times Facebook has cleaned up many malicious applications that steal personal data, which were offered as games or interactive surveys (such as "how will you be in 40 years" or "what soulmate will you meet?") But in reality they only stole personal data, violating all privacy rules; in severe cases they could also provide full access to our profile, without our permission!
Fortunately, it is therefore increasingly difficult to run into this type of content (especially after the case of 2018 where an app was able to collect personal data on Facebook by deception), but if in case we still found some sharing or some notification on games or polls we don't want to know about, we can turn them off by clicking on the three dots of the notification and using the Disable notifications item on this page / app . If the app appears in the news stream, simply click on the three dots at the top right of the post and use the items Do not follow the app anymore, Hide app notifications and Report app .
If you happened to click on a strange link that appeared on Facebook or if you accidentally allowed an application that appeared to be malicious, proceed as follows to withdraw access and protect your account .
Click the down arrow button at the top right, then open the Settings and in the right column go to Games and websites . Click on Show All, select the suspicious apps and then press the Remove button. on the X to the right to remove it completely. The application will no longer be able to collect data from your profile.
For more details, also read how to remove Facebook applications that steal data and information
Collection of Likes and Fake News
This unfortunately is a still very recurring threat on Facebook: a page, a site or a single character require you to like a photo, a video or any shared content, with the aim of spreading a fake message (with the addition of a little "psychological pressure", since it is often seasoned with phrases like "will soon be censored or obscured by strong powers") or simply collect a good amount of personal data from the unsuspecting people who click on the fateful button like. Fortunately, Facebook is now able to detect most of the sites and pages that broadcast "Fake News", obscuring them from the stream of all users, but it is not enough.
The most experienced in this type of threat, called "engagement bait", use Likes as real "votes" in a prize contest: the winner will be offered the meeting or a phone call with an important person, often a politician of national fame. Obviously, beyond the goodness of the prize (often true), the organizers of the "prize competition" will take the trouble to collect all the data of users who leave the Like, including information such as political, religious, personal interests and place of birth (all very useful information to carry out marketing campaigns and customized political campaigns).
The less experienced in this type of threat will instead collect the Likes on protective religious photographs, on animals to be saved, on children with serious diseases (with really ridiculous phrases such as "only with 1 million likes will heal") and so on, with the aim of reselling these likes to marketing agencies or sites in search of fast visibility (they pay to get the likes of another page or another site) .
You can defend yourself from these threats to privacy, just ignore any type of post, video or image in which you force the user to like and share and check news, from reliable sources, whether they are true or not, such as well described in our Fake News guide : how to recognize them and avoid false news .
People we don't know
Precisely because of the large number of likes and shares that we have (possibly) given to the right and left in the app, in photographs or in strange surveys, it can happen to receive notification of one or more completely unknown users who ask us for friendship.
Instead of adding without criterion, let's try to remember if this person is of our knowledge, even in times gone by: if we can't find any link, most likely it is a fake account or one of those bot accounts that bind to the profile with the purpose to quickly access data hidden by Facebook's privacy filters (if we set the social network to show all data only to friends ).
It is useless to add people we don't know: to keep our privacy safe, it is better to add only trusted people or people we have known for a long time, ignoring the friend requests of people we have never seen in the face.
Conclusions
Whenever a site asks to access via Facebook account, you must always be careful and see what information we are going to make visible for those who manage that site. In most cases they will be only name and email address, in other cases, however, it will be all the profile information that will be usable from that site for commercial or electoral or advertising purposes.A golden rule for keeping your PC safe is to update your operating system and browser to surf the internet ; many applications exploit browser or operating system vulnerabilities to access private information. In this regard, I invite you to read our guides on how to update your PC and check for Windows updates and how to update Android apps on smartphones and tablets .
Another interesting article to read to increase the security of your Facebook account is about how to avoid getting your Facebook password stolen and account theft .
