Facebook – Security (Identity Theft)
Today, I was amused to read in the morning edition of The Hindustan Times that the noted economist Amartya Sen is a victim of identity theft on the social networking website Facebook. The Newspaper further wrote that “Not only has his identity been stolen, the impostor is contradicting Sen’s political views.”
The newspaper also reported that “Identity theft on Facebook is nothing new for celebrities. Actress Kristen Stewart, singer Peter Andre, Bollywood actor Anil Kapoor and actresses Shazahn Padamsee and Malaika Arora Khan are among those who have had to report complaints against imposters.”
Amartya Sen has 490 friends on Facebook – including a physiology professor from Kolkata and a graduate from Oxford. He is a fan of Pakistani poet Josh Malihabadi, and, curiously, supports free-market libertarian Ludwig von Mises. The only problem is, this is not 76-year-old Nobel laureate Amartya Sen.
Read the rest of the article in Hindustan Times
He is an eminent Indian economist. He is currently the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. He is also a senior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he served as Master from 1998 to 2004. He is the first Asian and the first Indian academic to head an Oxbridge college.
He is known as “the Conscience and the Mother Teresa of Economics” for his work on famine, human development theory, welfare economics, the underlying mechanisms of poverty, gender inequality, and political liberalism. In 1998, Sen won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to work on welfare economics.
Amartya Sen’s books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He is a trustee of Economists for Peace and Security. In the year 2010, Time magazinelisted him among the 100 most influential persons in the world.
– From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I am an active member of Facebook, and I was curious to study the matter myself.
There are two types of accounts on Facebook – Pages and People. I made a Facebook search on Amartya Sen, and found 18 page results and 25 people results.
I found the first two community pages perhaps created by some fans of Amartya Sen.
Among the people accounts, I didn’t find any imposter profile as reported in the Newspaper. These are personal profiles of people who are also Amartya Sen by name.
See the screengrab below (I am not showing the people results to respect their privacy):
Amartya Sen Search on Facebook
There are also many groups, mainly created by Amartya Sen fans. Fans of Amartya Sen is one such group. See the screengrab below.
Amartya Sen Group on Facebook
How to Report a Person or Page
If someone has created an account to impersonate or imitate you, please go to the impostor profile and click “Report this person” in the left column. Check the “Report this person” box, choose “Fake profile” as the reason, and add “Impersonating me or someone else” as the report type. Be sure to add a valid web address (URL) leading to the real profile so that we can review the information.
Facebook Help Centre
If you visit a profile and feel that is an impostor profile, you may report that profile by clicking Report this person in the left column.
If you visit a page and feel that page is impersonating you or someone you know, you may report that page by clicking Report Page in the left column.
How to Create a Facebook Page
Creating a page on Facebook is very simple. There are two types of pages, an Official Page and a Community Page.
You may create an Official Page to communicate with your customers if you are a local business, brand, product or organisation; and to communicate with your fans if you are an artist, band or public figure.
I’m the official representative of this person, business, band or product and have permission to create this Page.
You may create a Community Page to generate support for your favourite cause or topic.
Besides pages, you may create a group and communicate directly with other Facebook members who share a professional interest, cause or hobby.
I failed to locate the imposter profile of Amartya Sen. If you have any information on this issue, please leave your feedback.
Do you have any experience about impersonation on social media networking sites like Twitter and Facebook? If so, please share your experience.
GoldenTwine Informatics has a strong presence on Facebook. We have a personal page, and a community page for our blog. Besides, you may also follow our blog on NetworkedBlogs.
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While there may be social aspects to any medium (e.g. links to share an article by email), social media typically refers to those media whose major functions are oriented toward sharing of information, and consequently most of the information on such media are generated by users. Common examples of social media sites are Twitter and Facebook.
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