We were all raised to be wary of strangers. Except, apparently, on the Internet.
It’s kind of a problem because marketing departments love collecting this kind of stuff about you, and Facebook, hating it, has stuff like CAPTCHA and the Facebook Immune System to stop it. But that didn’t prevent researchers from the University of British Columbia to write some robot Facebookers, have them send out random friend requests, and see what happened. 20% said sure, I’ll be your friend, and then the bot sent friend requests to all their friends…and 60% of THOSE accepted the request.
And none of them wanted to subscribe to Sean Parker, because they all thought his whining about being a multi-billionaire made him a douche.
They also discovered that this made accessing personal information dead easy: they walked away with 250GB worth of data from over a million accounts. Facebook, of course, insists that your data is absolutely safe and only they are allowed to touch it. Which they do. At night. When they think nobody is watching. They gaze at it admiringly.
What do you want? It’s creepy over in Zuckerland.