When Victor Diaz Zapanta was featured on Mashable for his Facebook account’s creative timeline design, he was excited. But that sweet feeling soon soured slightly when the 29-year-old designer’s account was parodied by impostors claiming to be him.
It happened at least four times, and at one point Facebook even suspended his profile, forcing the Washington, D.C., resident to verify his account way before Facebook introduced its new page and profile verification on Wednesday.
“I’ve been playing whack-a-mole with reporting fake profiles on Facebook every couple months,” he says. ”I’m guessing people were into the Facebook timeline I made and just don’t think it’s a big deal to impersonate someone.”
That’s because Zapanta thinks people were fascinated with his timeline-within-a-timeline image. Within hours of the Mashable story, which published in late 2011, Zapanta says he was inundated with friend requests and soon a slew of impersonators, mostly from Asia. He admits the attention was mildly flattering at first, but it soon turned into a headache “to explain to people when they try to add me on Facebook, that at this point, more often that not, there’s somebody posing as me on Facebook. As a fairly social person, this is something that comes up for me pretty often.”
Zapanta still regularly finds new impostors, causing him to have trouble when he meets new people he’d like to be friends with online
Zapanta still regularly finds new impostors, causing him to have trouble when he meets new people he’d like to be friends with online. Because people are pretending to be him online.
Facebook’s new verification process was developed, in part, to help people like Zapanta curb these problems. The verification badge is now visible as a checkmark on accounts, much like the system employed by Twitter.
“We’ve built enforcement mechanisms to quickly shut down malicious pages, accounts and applications that attempt to spread spam by deceiving users or by exploiting several well-known browser vulnerabilities,” Facebook told Mashable. “We have partnered with the leaders in the security industry to both block malicious websites and offer our users free security software to better protect themselves, no matter where they are on the web.”
Specifics are still being ironed out as the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company refines the process, looking at tools to determine grounds for verification. But already, one potential problem with this fledgling system is that there is no way to request verification beyond contacting Facebook’s help center.
And the problem with the system is that it seems to be primarily designed to help people find and interact with high-profile accounts.
And the problem with the system is that it seems to be primarily designed to help people find and interact with high-profile accounts. In other words, mainly those that belong to celebrities.
Which is exactly what concerns Zapanta with the program. He says he’s glad to see Facebook starting to verify accounts, but is worried that they’ll focus more on people “with an extremely high number of subscribers.” But the fear is that the verification system is targeted to famous people as opposed to regular folk. And that could expose a weakness in the system.
More than 140,000 people follow LockerGnome founder and tech personality Chris Pirillo on Facebook. He’s also had trouble with parody accounts. And his own family has even been fooled by impostors.
“My wife added the wrong Chris Pirillo,” he admits. That profile had Pirillo’s same avatar and profile background. He says she was fooled because she didn’t notice the different vanity URL. ”It’s easy to mistake the wrong person for the right one on Facebook, or any social network. The higher their profile, the higher the likelihood of their name or brand being spoofed and fans misled.”
Pirillo said he was surprised that despite having mutual friends with his wife, Facebook didn’t steer her to the right profile. “Why didn’t Facebook say: ‘Hey, that’s probably not the person you’re wanting to add. There’s a ‘Chris Pirillo’ that shares ‘n’ friends with you over here. Shall we do this for you?’”
Facebook says it shuts down profiles spewing nothing but spam. But the social network’s not implementing automated verification when it comes to protecting our profiles. Which means it’s up to us to monitor our own accounts. Perhaps in the next iteration of this program this will be addressed. It’s a wait and see. And the irony is that this system doesn’t protect people’s privacy as much as their intellectual property, says Rebecca Jeschke, a digital rights analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“It’s a way for folks to be clear about the source of a social media account,” Jeschke explains. But it’s not a cure-all if someone wants to impersonate you. “If you’re verified, it doesn’t prevent someone from making a fake account about you.”
She says accounts that parody well-known personalities, like those on Twitter, are important forms of discourse. “It would be good if this verification policy encourages services to be more tolerant of parody accounts.” But with Facebook’s real name policy, she says she’s not sure if that could even happen.
Zapanta, whose own online life has been disrupted by impersonators, isn’t as open or confident that the new system will curtail this behavior.
“I do hope verification will help, but it’s hard to predict,” Zapanta laments.
To all those stealing his likeness and identity, Zapanta has a message: “Stop being a creep and create your own compelling online persona. I put genuine effort into my online presence and it’s something I pride. It’s unfortunate that people are trying to fool others in stealing that.”
Will Facebook's Account Verification System Discourage Impostors?
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