Continuing in my annoyance with and dislike of certain aspects of Facebook gaming (as previously seen in these three posts), a recent case study shows that 24% of social gamers have insecure friending habits.
As I’ve said, the design of many games is to have as many friends as possible. Â Lately, I’ve been playing Zombie Wars. Â Decent game, I enjoy it, but I’m stuck. Â I need 20 people in my colony to move to the next area. Â I have 13. Â I have sent invites to most, if not all, of my 149 friends, but can’t get another 7 of them to start playing. Â The game is dead to me. Â I could, however, go to the Zombie Wars fan page and find people who also need more colony members and friend them in order to get moving.
This is where the insecurity comes in. Â By default in Facebook, a “friend” has access to everything on your profile, unless you’ve specifically gone in and denied access to a particular piece of info. Â You can restrict someone’s access by making a group, denying access to that group, and then adding that person to the group. Â This is cumbersome and not obvious. Â And if you engage in adding people for the sole purpose of progressing in a game, you are likely to accept a friendship of someone saying, “Hey! Add me for Zombie Wars!” even though you don’t know them. Â Those people might not even be real. Â They could be a phishing profile, looking to get at your personal data that is hidden behind the “friend barrier” and if you let them in without restriction they’ll get it.
I hope the way Facebook games work evolves. Â In the meantime, I hope people start to pay attention to how they use Facebook, because they could be risking more than they know.