Social Media 101 – Experiment
Posted on July 31st, 2009
Last week I wrote about not giving out your password. Did you listen and learn?
I did an experiment to find out. I created a quick little site and sent out 1 tweet about it. The tweet was…
@thinkreferrals have you seen this? http://twitterverified.com/
From that tweet 50 people clicked on the link and of those 50 people 44 of them entered a username and password.
That is right 88% of people shared their twitter username and password with a site that they should not have.
Please take into consideration that your account could be used maliciously if you give someone your password. Your followers would not appreciate you sending out porn, virus or spam to them if your account was compromised.
Do you share your password?
Do these results show a problem with social media users? or do you think all users would have a similar result?
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5 Comments
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That was you?! Oh man.
It certainly felt like more than 44 people were affected!!
The number inside was a counter not based on IP.
I wanted to see how many times people would refresh. A lot did.
That is a very interesting social [media] experiment. I often use pagerank to determine how credible a site is, but even that can be faked.
About 90% fell for this ? Wow , just wow. If you made the password field with the **** it would have been more realistic.
The counter is at 333.
There are many sites out there doing the exact same thing , but actually using your information. Some are coping paypal or other payment processors , they make the site look exactly the same. If you have security software you should be notified that its a duplicate site. I have seen this a few times and got notified. If you dont have such software , you need to check security certificates , or make sure your at the right site. Some make the domains very similar with just one letter different.
This gave me an idea about a post i will write up sometime. Thanks
OUCH! Us humans are far tooeasily bamboozled, especially if confronted by something that appears authorative. This is a brilliant little social experiment, and it does get the mind going a bit, thinking about the inherent possibilities…..