Note on How Many Facebook Users Go About Logging into their Accounts

Note on How Many Facebook Users Go About Logging into their Accounts(marco.org)

25 points by mgorsuch 16 years ago | 16 comments

jrockway 16 years ago |

Brilliant. What's nice is that you can actually log into Facebook "on their site", because comments are accepted via Facebook Connect.

I'm still having trouble believing this:

   1) Type "facebook login" into the browser bar.
   2) Get Google results page, with a news story called "Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login" at the top.
   3) Click that link
   4) Observe a red page that says "Read Write Web" at the top, taking up nearly half the screen.
   5) See a facebook logo and a facebook connect login prompt.
   6) Log in to comment, and whine about how "I am going to delete my account if I ever figure out how to log in"
   7) ???

I just don't get how so many people could make so many errors. If you know English well enough to comment, you probably know how to read the article, and the links, and the message on the Facebook Connect page.

I am having such trouble comprehending this that I think it's fake. But I'm probably wrong :(

simonw 16 years ago | |

Users don't read. They're not in "comprehending" mode - they're in "find the damned blue button and log in so I can get on with what I really wanted to do" mode.

jrockway 16 years ago | | |

I can sort of understand this; sometimes I press the wrong button on the elevator at home (thinking I'm at work), and I get off on the wrong floor. I am confused for a second, but I eventually realize that I am not at the right place. I definitely don't start ranting about how I can't believe they renumbered my apartment, repainted the hallway, and changed my lock. I just get back into the elevator and go to the correct floor; perhaps slightly more aware of what that task entails than I was when I first pressed the button.

Why is the Internet any different?

yungchin 16 years ago | |

You're wrong :)

From Marco's post: "You can see the same effect on anything ranked highly by a Google search for “facebook login”, including this: http://www.khabrein.info/news/New_Facebook_homepage__new_Fac....

mattdw 16 years ago |

I really don't know how to feel about this. As much as I want to say "get a brain" to these people… a problem this widespread really can't be considered an individual problem.

This is, I guess, representative of the problems the iPad is aimed at, but I'd really rather there was a better solution.

dasil003 16 years ago | |

It's just a matter of the numbers involved. With hundreds of millions of users on Facebook it's inevitable that some of them are going to be either complete internet beginners or straight-up idiots.

Also, once you get a few dozen of those messages, the trolls come out and pretty soon you can't tell who is confused and who's just piling on for fun:

What is rong heer. I wnted to get my bebo. But my bebo wos stolen. I just wnt my bebo back. I dunt want your crappy site wheres my bebo you will get sud for million dollas $$$$ for bebonets stealing

Well said, MrFerret. Well said.

fragmede 16 years ago | |

So someone makes a webpage that looks exactly like the iPad home screen, puts a bunch of icons for apps on it, one of which is the facebook app icon. All of the icons link to the same page2.html that looks exactly like the facebook app login screen, which then gets stolen.

Given how uniquely unobservant you'd have to be to have this problem, I'm willing to bet that would successfully phish a few hundred credentials. Alternately, this all an elaborate hoax that we've fallen for. (Please?)

pmjordan 16 years ago |

I guess this explains why even the most obvious of phishing sites work.

_delirium 16 years ago |

This is one reason I like the behavior of Chrome's URL bar. It sometimes gets it wrong, but I think it frequently guesses correctly when I start typing something whether I want to: 1) visit a site I've recently/frequently visited; or 2) search for that term. If you just start typing "facebook" in the URL bar and hit enter you'll end up at facebook.com instead of performing a search for it.

I must confess that I often use something like this myself, though, despite being a tech person. I can never remember the stupid URL for my university's obscurely-located courseware system, for example, so I usually just Google for universityname coursewarename and click on the first result. I guess I could bookmark it, but this method works fine.

simonw 16 years ago |

What really depresses me about this kind of thing is how at-risk these people are of online fraud. The internet means everyone is just one hop away from a criminal, and mass phishing attacks are lucrative enough that there will always be attempts at them.

Unfortunately, if you want to stay safe online you need to understand an incredibly dense stack of technologies - you need to know what a browser is, how URLs and domains are formatted (so you know the difference between facebook.com and facebookcom.com), what an actual website is, how easy it is for someone to create a fake looking login page, how to judge if something is safe to enter your credit card in to...

I make my living on the web and I want to continue to do so. I need people to use it for e-commerce and to trust their private information to it. But I'm horribly aware that for anyone who isn't knowledgeable about how it all works, I'm basically encouraging them to join an unsafe environment which is almost certain to rip them off.

Stuff like the iPad is a step forward, but it doesn't help address the core problem - it will be exactly as easy to fall for basic internet cons on the iPad as a regular desktop machine.

I'm pretty much stumped.

kaddar 16 years ago |

Wow, this is dangerous, given how dumb these people are, a less nice blog could be stealing passwords.

imajes 16 years ago | |

why bother? the password is just 1Password or any of the other twenty common passwords.

mixmax 16 years ago | | |

Because the password to their homebanking account is the same.

NathanKP 16 years ago |

Incredible! I don't understand how so many people could be so clueless. Also, I wonder why Facebook.com isn't the first result for "facebook login".

jmaygarden 16 years ago | |

It's not first because Google places recent news stories before the general web search results.

1) Type "facebook login" into the browser bar. 2) Get Google results page, with a news story called "Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login" at the top. 3) Click that link 4) Observe a red page that says "Read Write Web" at the top, taking up nearly half the screen. 5) See a facebook logo and a facebook connect login prompt. 6) Log in to comment, and whine about how "I am going to delete my account if I ever figure out how to log in" 7) ???