Phishing scams are widely popular on Facebook. Cyber criminals relentlessly pursue ways and means to obtain Facebook usernames and passwords. These compromised accounts often send out spam or scam messages virally across the platform. Scammers can also data mine these accounts and their network of friends. This information can be used for identity theft or…

Kristal McKenzie, a young mother in North Carolina, got rid of her Facebook profile in 2011. However, shortly after that, she received a notification from the site – in Spanish – that she had signed up for an account. She translated the message and realized that it was intended for a young teenage girl in…

You use many different usernames and passwords to log in to your personal and work accounts. Managing all of your login information can become an overwhelming task, that’s why a lot of people tend to use the same password over and over again and/or create passwords that directly relate to them, such as a pet’s…

According to Facebook’s fourth-quarter earnings report from 2013, between 5.5 percent and 11.2 percent of Facebook profiles were fake in 2013. While that sounds like a lot, it seems even more staggering when you consider the raw numbers: that means that at least 67.65 million fake accounts were used, and that number could even be…

Facebook’s targeted ads are a common subject of complaints lodged against the site; the ads’ use of users’ personal information and interests often feels invasive. However, don’t expect that kind of technology to go away anytime soon. Indeed, according to Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, the site is currently working on “contextual ads” that would target users…

Facebook has long been opposed to users’ identifying themselves with fake names on the site. However, according to a recent interview with Mark Zuckerberg in Bloomberg Businessweek, the site may be mulling the idea of eventually allowing people – in some cases – to use fake names. “I don’t know if the balance has swung…

Facebook’s privacy controls can be frustrating and confusing, and as The New York Times points out, they often have to be adjusted on an item by item basis – as the site intends. “It’s not about going to a settings page to find some random setting,” Blake Barnes, Facebook’s product manager for privacy, told the…

An Israeli tech company has developed an app, FakeOff, which can help users detect fake Facebook profiles. The app builds a list of “suspects” for investigation, uses an algorithm to analyze their information, gets results of their fakery on a 1-10 score, and even scans a suspect’s profile to see if they’re using someone else’s…

This week, the Freeland Police Department in Pennsylvania posted the wanted photo of 35-year-old man Anthony James Lescowitch, who they were searching for in connection to an assault that took place over the summer. Lescowitch certainly didn’t help his own getaway efforts, posting his own wanted photo on his Facebook wall and taunting the police…

Derek Muller is the curator for science video blog Vertiasium, which has about 118,000 Facebook fans. That’s a pretty good-sized audience, but, according to Muller, there’s a problem: he claims that only a tiny percentage of the page’s fan base is actually seeing the posts that the page publishes and that Facebook is burying the…