Facebook plans to charge users £5.99 ($9) for “subscription gold” that will keep our accounts private?
Outrageous!!!
No, seriously, it is outrageous.
But that isn’t keeping the Facebook rumour du jour from being passed around.
Here’s the whole, bogus shebang:
I havent had time to check it out and won't get around to it until tomorrow but I guess this need investigating
Now it's official! It has been published in the media. Facebook has just released the entry price: £5.99 to keep the subscription of your status to be set to "private". If you paste this message on your page, it will be offered free (I said paste not share) if not tomorrow, all your posts can become public. Even the messages that have been deleted or the photos not allowed. After all, it does not cost anything for a simple copy and paste
Nope, a “simple copy and paste” costs nothing at all – nothing, that is, except for the cost of other concerned users spreading the message to their own followers, who then spread it to their followers, with it all unfolding like the multiple mirrored lenses of a dupe kaleidoscope.
Facebook may pull some weird stunts, but making its users’ posts public unless they fork over some moolah or paste a particular status message? Um, no.
Facebook isn’t exactly what you’d deem a stranger to privacy complaints. Most recently, that’s meant getting dragged into court by the Belgian privacy commission over its use of tracking cookies.
If the company up and decided to take our privacy, douse it with lighter fluid and then toss in a lit match – all without any notice whatsoever – but with the completely unheralded option of snatching it from the fire with a random bunch of sentences pasted into your status update, you’d have heard about it.
You’d have seen headlines screaming out the news from big news websites like the BBC, from privacy watchdogs like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or from (ahem!) data security sites like Naked Security.
That’s common sense. But the copy-and-paste-this-post hoax is a genre unto itself, and it seems to do just fine with posts that don’t make any sense at all.
Similar rumours include the one about an upcoming “price grid membership”.
And of course we recently saw the Facebook “Dislike” button scams once again rear their heads, inspired, no doubt, by the fact that Facebook is, at last, actually working on a dislike button.
Or, well, maybe not a “dislike” button, per se, but at least something beyond the plain old vanilla “Like” button.
At any rate, here’s a Facebook button that is absolutely, positively real and not a chainmail hoax: it’s the “Delete” button.
If you know anybody who fell for the £5.99-or-we’ll-torch-your-privacy hoax, tell them that that “Delete” button works great to scrub the post off their pages and keep their contacts from falling for it!
If you want to keep up with all the Facebook news you can use, you can Like the Naked Security Facebook page.
And feel free to copy and paste the link to this story onto your timeline so that your friends don’t fall for the hoax either!
Image of retro style thumbs down courtesy of Shutterstock.com
Image of Facebook hoax post courtesy of Facebook.com
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