Lifestyle blogger Rosie Thomas is used to having her name and image stolen by strangers on Facebook. That’s why she wasn’t surprised this week when she discovered a page that spammed plastic surgery promotions was using her name and pictures from her profile.

Thomas says that her identity has been used before without her consent for pro-life-supporting websites, extreme Christians claiming that the world is ending soon and shady spam pages. However, she says that she’s had a hard time reaching an actual human being when she contacts Facebook to remove them. Overall, she is frustrated by her inability to make the site listen to her.

“With all the billions of dollars at Facebook you would think that they could hire a real person to look over these sort of complaints. They couldn’t care less,” she said. “Online grooming and identity theft is a huge issue, and I don’t see how such a big company with such a young user base can ignore the issue.”

Of course, there are stricter privacy settings that any individual can implement to lock down their photos and content. You can limit the audience that sees your profile, or upload small-sized photos to the site that would be useless if stolen. However, that kind of precaution is impossible for someone in the public eye like Thomas.

Recommended Resources

Blur is the first all-in-one solution that protects your passwords, payments, and privacy. It gives power back to people making it simple to choose what amount of their personal information they are OK providing to any website: no matter a) what they are doing- surfing, creating a new account, or shopping, or b) what device they are using – mobile phone, browser or tablet.

BitDefender Traffic Light is a free cross-browser add-on that intercepts, processes and filters all Web traffic, blocking any malicious content and taking browser security to new levels.

System Mechanic 14 – Make your computer run like new. Winner of 200+ Editor’s Choice awards!