Get To Know Your Friends…A Little Too Well

Let me try and explain the soundtrack. Years ago, my parents got their computers full of nasty viruses and malware, and they were receiving tons of spam. I was trying to figure out how things got so bad, and mom said that one day a pop-up came up asking her to click on the flying ducks to win a prize. That pop-up probably wasn’t good news, but mom thought it was a harmless little game. Now, there are potentially identity-stealing Facebook quizzes. I think they are the new duck. I don’t want this new duck, but whenever I say “the new duck”, this song appears in my head.

“Please be aware of some of the posts you comment on,” the Sutton Police Department in Massachusetts wrote in a cautionary message. “The posts that ask what was your first grade teacher, who was your childhood best friend, your first car, the place you [were] born, your favorite place, your first pet, where did you go on your first flight … Those are the same questions asked when setting up accounts as security questions. You are giving out the answers to your security questions without realizing it.”

When I think of how many people fill out those quizzes, it scares me. I know they’re not all bad, but they sure do like to ask a lot of security questions, so even if they’re not actually hoovering up the information, they’re causing you to splatter it all over people’s feeds, leaving it open for other people to hoover up.

I’m so glad my folks don’t do Facebook.

Oh, and by the way, this is a pretty great commercial about identity theft. Now, I can’t not call hockey “skatey punchy”.

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