I’m pretty sure everyone in our class has used facebook. Even our beloved Professor Drake has a page (good luck getting him to accept your friend request if you’re a current student). Anyways, to some facebook has A LOT of personal info stored on there accounts. Thats why we all set different privacy settings to protect ourselves from our Bosses, parents, or just plain stalkers. Well this past weekend I was doing my usual surfing of the web and came across this interesting story that I didn't know how to feel about it. It was an interview with a previous employee of Facebook who spilled the beans on some secrets. The biggest being that everyone who worked for Facebook had one password that would allow them to log in as anyone.
Guess what the password was….Chuck Norris!!! Seriously, that seems a little to childish to me, almost like it was one huge joke to everyone at the office. Other than the ridiculous password, I was more mad at the fact that the employee also mentioned that they could see any information that you have ever deleted or which profiles you visit. Just imagine dating someone who works at the Facebook office, they would have you on lock down lol. Or if its some creeper that you met at a party on a Saturday and that you ended up shooting down. They could do some serious damage to your profile the following Monday. The person could write made up things on other peoples profiles as you or just get sensitive information like where you live.
I guess the part of the ex employee interview that put my mind most to rest was them saying that the "Chuck Norris" password could only be used on computers inside of Facebook offices. This still doesn’t make it totally alright. I’m definitely all for technology and love how facebook has given me a way to reconnect with all my past friends/teammates from high school and college. But can we get a notice or disclosure when we sign up for Facebook of what employees are allowed to see or do to our accounts?
I guess this is just a remainder to everyone: Don’t ever put anything on the internet that you wouldn’t mind sharing with everyone!!
The password is not that unusual IMO. When I was a software developer, I used famous book characters and movie characters as logins and passwords for test accounts.
ReplyDeleteSecurity has always been an issue for most areas on the internet. Its not just what you put on there that you should be worried about. Banks and other kinds of places have personal and financial information out there.
ReplyDeleteIts pretty scary now days because almost anyone can find out background information on you if they want to.
I have limited experience in the software development world, but when working at a software development company we didn't use famous characters or things like that, but we did use obvious names for passwords such as project names and things like that. The only thing that was different is that we changed characters in the names to ! or 1 and things like that.
ReplyDeleteI agree though, if you don't want to share it with everyone then you should keep it off the internet.
It is nice to know that Facebook employees take security so seriously...
ReplyDeleteI wonder what personal information is protected by an equally worthless password? Regardless of how common it is for developers to use these "funny" passwords may be, it is still a large risk to the average user.