Like everything else in the life, be it death or falling in love, spam is inevitable. From spam emails to spam messages, from spam comments on your Facebook wall to spam posts about hacking your Facebook account, spam is pretty real and undeniable part of our online life.
We normally have quite a lot of readers mailing us about application spams that their account is facing, they sometimes know about which specific application is causing the spam, whereas as more often is the case, people are confounded by the spammy posts that is happening on their wall and wonder if their account is hacked OR this again is one of those Facebook application doing all that nonsense posting. Some application sometimes act like spam but are pretty genuine, while applications which promises to show you who has viewer your profile, who is your TRUE LOVE or who is going to kill you, are guaranteed to be fake. In simpler terms Facebook never gives authority to the developers to access such information and make an app from that, so someone promising you that they can give you details about who viewed your profile are just disguising you. In a recent blog post Facebook clearly said, the sites/extensions that claims to show you who’s viewing your profile, change the color of your profile or help you remove your Timeline. These features don’t exist.
First off everyone should know that there are no formal review process to publish applications on Facebook, what this means is that anybody(including me and you) can make an app on Facebook and publish it irrespective of its intended use. This is where spammy developers win and publish application which can hurt one’s profile and post useless stuff to either promote their website or spread some viruses as one may call it. This is unlike other platform’s like Google Play or Apple, which have “Walled Garden” approach, wherein a developer has to submit the application for formal review and once the review team checks for its intended use, spammy codes, malware they than approve those application So, if you think that since the application is on Facebook, it has to be legitimate, you better change that perspective.
Secondly, it’s important to note that spammy applications like who viewed my profile or who stalked me normally don’t have any valid description on their app page. Like in this case, we consider Twitter and Who viewed my profile app, as we can see twitter has proper description whereas who viewed my profile fails to give any description. So it’s essential that you always install application from trusted sources, rather than installing application which look spammy from the outset.
Although, some of the applications might appear harmless, as they might well have proper description, proper website but they sometimes ask for information which might be potentially risk, like if an app is asking you for permission to access your birthday or is asking permission to post statuses on your wall on their behalf is directly invading your privacy. Consider this example:
The application is asking to give access to your birthday as well give them the authority to post on your wall on behalf of them, do you seriously want some anonymous guy/bot to post on your behalf and also has access to your birthdays?, providing such details might well give spammers a chance to do identity theft, do social engineering or sell your data.
Recommended Read :
- How to Protect Your Facebook Account From Spam Applications?
- How to setup your Facebook Account for maximum Privacy and Security?
- Ultimate Guide To Secure Your Facebook Account.
- Facebook Giving Free Trials Of Antiviruses, Download Now
- How To Remove Your Name From Facebook Sidebar Social Ads
Apart from above mentioned points, there will be application which will fall in grey area, where you will still doubts if the application is to be trusted or not, so here we list down couple of steps that you can do to identify “Scam and Spam” applications once you have opened it.
- First check out who's the developer of the application, you're going to give permission.
- Check out the description of the app, for what purpose the app is created etc.? Of all the application which we were requested to review, 95%+ of application had no description or no proper details about who has developed the application.
- Which of your personal information this app will access?
- What can be posted by the app on your behalf?
- How many people are using the application and how are the reviews? Never trust NUMBERS in this case, because spammy and viral applications garner numbers quickly rather than genuine ones. Look at reviews about the application or at least checkout wall postings on their Facebook page.
For more information on how to identify a spam, fun and entertaining apps and how to protect your account from spam applications, and how to report a spam app, we recommend you to read out our this guide.
As mentioned above, there are lot of factors one should consider while installing applications, just ask yourself: Is the app worth your personal data? 99% of the time, the answer has to straight forward NO!
