Facebook groups hijacked

An organization that calls itself “Control Your Info” is believed to have hijacked hundreds of Facebook groups. The hijacker maintains that it comes in peace and just wants to point out the flaws existing in the way Facebook manages its groups. Mercifully, there has been no hacking or phishing, so far.

Facebook, a global social networking site, has a user strength of about 300 million, and growing. Originally started as a socializing website for college students, Facebook allows users to form groups on the basis of their hobbies, jobs, the colleges they studied, or the causes they believe in. Members of a group share a number of things including activities, views, data, and images among themselves, which they may not be comfortable sharing with others.

The flaws in Facebook groups
Any Facebook user can start a group under any valid cause. A group is normally moderated by a “group administrator”. The group administrator can change a group name and moderate group communication.

When the group administrator steps down, any member from the group can pick up the responsibility of group administration and continue communicating to the group members.

Control Your Info has picked up these abandoned groups and claims to have brought to attention how anybody could become a group administrator and misuse personal information.

Control Your Info has left behind an interesting info to each group member:

"Hello, we hereby announce that we have officially hijacked your Facebook group. This means we control a certain part of the information about you on Facebook. If we wanted we could make you appear in a bad way which could damage your image severely.

"For example we could rename your group and call it something very inappropriate and nasty, like 'I support pedophile's rights.' But have no fear — we won't. We just renamed it Control Your Info. Because this is really all we want:

"Think about the safety in your social media life to the same extent you do in your real life.

"Watch the video clip for more information or check out www.controlyour.info for more tips soon!

"We promise to restore your group name and leave the group by the end of next week. Don't worry — we won't mess anything up."

Facebook’s assurance
Though it is not a comfortable situation for users to be in, Facebook has assured that group administrators cannot view personal information and have very limited powers.

It said, “Group administrators have no access to private user information and group members can leave a group at any time. For small groups, administrators can simply edit a group name or info, moderate discussion, and message group members.”

The claim of Control Your Info becomes weak when Facebook maintains, “The names of large groups cannot be changed nor can anyone message all members. In the rare instances when we find that a group has been changed inappropriately, we will disable the group, which is the action we plan for these groups.”

Now the affected Facebook users have to leave their groups quickly. They also need to be very cautious of any email that asks them to confirm their Facebook ID and password.