We all seem to trust that the information we provide to social networking sites such as Bebo and Facebook is safe and secure, and that our account really is our account that nobody else can access or view certain parts of. However an incident such as the one that has occured tonight makes you think differently about your privacy and security in online communities.At about midnight tonight I was logged in to Bebo under my own account when next minute I noticed I was apparently a member of various 'groups' I had never been a part of before. It was then that I realised Bebo had me signed in under the account of a random girl from Christchurch - with full access to all her information and account features. A couple of minutes later I was suddenly logged in under yet ANOTHER random person's Bebo account, and it was a couple of minutes before Bebo logged me out completely. Obviously this was some kind of error that Bebo has to account for, but in the few minutes that I had access to these peoples accounts I could have done some serious damage, data gathering, or other things we all assume could not happen to our account.
I just hope that nobody randomly has access to my account in the past or future!
UPDATE:
12.30am: Bebo has signed me in again under a strangers account, I now have full access when I Iog in to this girl from Christchurch's information. The girl tells me she has been into 20 peoples accounts tonight and has had friends deleted from her own account.
1.30am: Bebo is now signing me in to various strangers accounts every 10-15min or so. They seem random, yet mostly from New Zealand and a couple have been from Dunedin.
5.30pm: Bebo has still not addressed the issue, which must be some kind of server error. The switching of accounts seems to becoming more frequent, and somebody who has been in my own account kindly uploaded a folder of pornography...
16 comments:
Your post just showed up on my Twitter feed - expect traffic :)
And I can't believe the problem has endured for as long as it has! Have you tried logging in lately?
Oh that's cool! Thanks!
Yeah I have been logged in for most of this afternoon, I thought it had ended, yet about 5 minutes ago I was suddenly in another strangers account.
My little brother up in Hamilton was also just telling me about the number of accounts he has been into today.
Yeah its happening to me too. But it seems its only New Zealanders so i'm not sure of the cause
This won't go down to well for them. People nowadays are extremely paranoid when it comes to social networking / stalkers / talking to strangers.
yeahh that happend to me a long time ago i was on my account looking at my friends list then i clicked to go to the next page and i was in somones elis friends list and i could delete frineds if i wanted to but when i clicked to go the next page i was back on my acc. BUT! still dats freaky what happend if some weridoo just goes on to my account. ALL MY INFORMATION IS THERE :(
Im from New Zealand.. Im Scared!! :(
This was actually a problem that Slingshot had with their cache and some peoples Bebo and other accounts did this.
You are correct! See this post for more information on Slingshot.
Hey,
could any1 help me?!
...
i was on 2 internet explorers at the time and the im bit at the bottom of the screen poppped up saying.. 'you have signed in on bebo on another computer to sign out ofone press 1 now.'
soo i pressed 1not thinking and now my username, password and email addres is changed i have wrote to bebo several times but there seems to be no reply could any1 help please? :(
yea well i like bebo and facebook
I just now wrote this to the Bebo team when canceling my account....
Hello Bebo.
You have added a lot of stress to my life.
Why? You already know! You've allowed people to send friends requests to my inbox for months, and giving me false information, and ignoring my requests, and not reading my emails, not forwarding my requests to your managers, and totally ignoring that I'm going to report this garbage Bebo website to the United States Better Business Bureau. I looked them up on Wikipedia so you can get educated on them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau
I follow them on Facebook, too, to stay updated on scams like Bebo. I'm going to write a very long presentation on my experiences with Bebo. I have a ton of blog readers, as well as contacts within Google development teams.
Bebo has successfully enraged me, abused me, and made me thoroughly hate them. That's hard to do.
So here I am deleting my membership, because your support team has stopped responding to my emails.
Your support team needs to be trained. Your website is full of bugs and needs to be destroyed. Everything I say here will be completely ignored, no matter what I do.
Bebo is the arm pit of the internet. It really is.
Thanks for responding to a few of my many concerned support requests, but I'm sorry that you can't take the time to think about your customers, let alone care about them. At first I was nice, but now I'm not, guess why that is. I bet you still don't get it.
Good bye forever you horrible Bebo. I hope you get shut down by the BBB very, very soon.
lol @ reporting to BBB. Only big ignorant babies cry like that because doing that IS A WASTE OF YOUR TIME.
yeahh, why would you want bebo shut down when there are millions of people in the world happily using it. i would not be happy if my bebo was deleted, go have a cry to someone else. havn't you ever made a mistake in your life?
grrrr.
Bebo still hasn't removed someone claiming to be a convicted paedophile while abusing my business trademark for their account name.
They need to pickup their game. What kind of structural planning did they do anyway? They open a viral marketing site and don't plan to scale their support to that kind of exponential growth. What that means is they will have poor service to all of their customers. Fans included. So write them a letter and let them know it's not good enough.
Better yet, vote with deleting your account and switch to their competitors that are better organised.
Recently an account showed up on Bebo using my name - which is very unusual. It had nude photos - not of me - but using my identity. I live in the USA so maybe what happened in New Zealand is happening in the US. I'm not even a Bebo member!
I asked them to take off the photos and the fraudulent account but my name still comes up in association with the sight. I'm disgusted. Shut Bebo down!!!!
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