Now that Facebook is a publicly traded company, they’re required to make quarterly disclosures about their practices, and that includes disclosing the number of active fake or duplicate profiles. Facebook pledged last year to word toward eliminating scam profiles from the site entirely, and while they haven’t yet achieved that lofty goal, the 2012 fourth-quarter numbers do show a slight dip in malicious pages.

The total overall percentage of fake accounts declined from 8.7 percent to 7.2 percent, though the total whole number of duplicate accounts actually increased by about 7 million accounts. However, the total number of fake accounts decreased from 83 million accounts to 76 million in the last six months. Since Facebook rededicated itself to eliminating fake profiles, they have especially set their sights on malicious accounts, or “undesirable” users.

The number of fake Facebook accounts that were considered malicious in the second quarter of 2012 accounted for only 1.5 percent of fake accounts at that time. However, by the fourth quarter of the year, that number had declined to only .9 percent. However, with 1 billion active users, this equates to roughly 9 million accounts. We often warn our readers about the dangers of fake profiles.

There are higher percentages of duplicate or misclassified accounts (think pages for pets, inanimate objects, mascots, etc.) than truly harmful spam accounts, but Facebook knows that the vast majority of those accounts are fairly innocuous. They’ll most likely get around to eliminating those eventually, but for now, the number of undesirable accounts on the site is decreasing, and that can only be a good thing for Facebook’s 1 billion active users.

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BitDefender Safego is a Facebook application you can install that will scan your News Feed and help keep you safe from scams on Facebook.

DoNotTrackMe protects your privacy by blocking online tracking. Abine – Online Privacy Starts Here.

SocialSafe helps you to create your library of you. It’s the safest place for your online life. Downloaded to your computer, auto organised and instantly searchable. Supports most major social networks.

PRIVATE WiFi® is a Personal VPN that encrypts everything you send and receive. Don’t access Facebook from a public WiFi hotspot without it.