Yesterday I got an add-to-friend request popped into my facebook. A young glorious looking lady was asking me to add her in my friend list.

I wasn’t fantasized but definitely curious. And my curiosity led me to think about a perfect scam plan.

If you have looked into how facebook is opening up its platform and let the meta-data available for api access, you will be amazed by how easy that you can collect photos, which school that people were attending, and what people were doing in a minute ago through the mini-feed, etc.

Another instance recently was reported by the social hacking blog,

The Compare People application on Facebook sends user profile information, such as age, gender, city, ZIP code, favorite music, favorite movies, favorite TV shows, favorite books, “about me,” activities, interests, and political view to Google AdSense when displaying advertisements within the application.

And my yesterday’s add-to-friend request from a stranger, it makes me think, facebook is such a wonderland for spammers and scammers, and we can be so vulnerable.

Say if I accept the add-to-friend request, without even requiring a single line of code, my profile, friends list, interest groups, status, everything that possibly can be linked back to my demographic and psychographic profile will be exposed to a stranger.

Also, some practices that really bother me such as a facebook application called “News Injector,” that basically helps you to spark a spam blast.

No wonder according to a recent social interaction study done by HP, 43% of the messages on facebook are spam. 43% is more than one-third of the messages and those messages can be carefully crafted to extract information from our social life.

Well, I can’t be self-defeating. So as a marketer, I will still give the Professional and Responsibleuse of the meta-data a two thumbs up. But as a facebook user, I vote against any abusive data practice without a second thought.

Please don’t get me wrong. I love meeting up news friends but all I expect is to have a mutual introduction done by a trusted friend first. Can facebook come up with at least a friend introduces friend practice or something like that? The value of a social network to me is all about trust. And hey, you don’t just pop into someone, act like a perfect stranger, and say you want to be a friend.

Hmm… stranger, do you know who I am? Do you know someone who knows who I am?

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