One problem - Hackers

This past week I read an article in Businessweek about LinkedIn and how they are suing unknown people for making fake accounts and gaining a lot of valuable information out of the website.  From the article, this is a really big deal in every social media website and they all suffer from people making multiple fake accounts.  People create thousands of fake accounts hoping to scam people and gain information about real people who are trying to use the site for a good purpose.  This is a problem that social media companies do not want to be dealing with.

The crazy thing about these hackers, is that most of them know the rules of the sites and are able to push to the very limits before anyone notices.  They can gain all this information that LinkedIn gathered in a long process and in a legit way in a short amount of time, and then trick and deceive people.  The people behind these fake accounts know what they are doing and are really good at it.  They do it very slowly so nobody knows it and over time gain a ton of accounts.  The LinkedIn issue started last spring, and the company is just getting around to sue these unknown hackers.  

LinkedIn could possibly win this case, as we have seen sites like Facebook and Craigslist win recent battles, but LinkedIn doesn't even know who they are up against.  To me, it sounds pretty hard to win a case that you don't even know who you are going against.  

I see this as not only a problem to the sites, but to the public people as well. People are making fake accounts all over and adding others who they may or may not know.  They are affecting people who connect with these fake accounts and think that they are real people.  They could also be affecting those if they duplicate names of accounts that are already made.  This is something I have seen on quite a few social media sites.  For example, on Twitter, there are fake accounts for a lot of people.  You look at somebody famous and there are quite a few accounts for that person. They try doing things like the "official account" or other ways to make sure you know it is the real person, but it still is influencing how people view them and what they think of them.

I have known some people who make fake Facebook accounts to spy on people or see what people are doing that they used to date or know in someway or another. I think social media is a very powerful tool and allows us to connect to so many people in so many different ways, but as well, the fake account/hacker issue is not a good one.  It is making some of these networks fake, not reliable, and misleading.  If the companies of social media can limit this and find a way to stop these hackers, we will all be better off!!