Annelie Näs

I recently blogged about the Profile Watcher, and why the groups promoting it are not legit. After writing this post I found out that the creators of these groups have an alternative motive that I was not aware of.

Apparently they encourage Facebook users to join the group, and when they have reached a certain amount of members they change the name of the group. Name changes which might be far from what you would never choose to join voluntarily.

The Swedish Newspaper Aftonbladet recently wrote in an article that the group called  “See who is visiting your Profile with the Profile Watcher ,“ suddenly changed name to “People who have sex fantasies about our children.” Even worse is that many of the affected people might not have been aware of the problem, as they turned off the “Group name notification.”

To handle this, there are now discussion to implement a rule that will remove the possibility to change a name of a group after it has reached a certain amount of members.

But until then, here is 3 tips:

• Check what groups you are a member of. To make sure that you know what groups your support, and that none of them have changed names.
• Let Facebook notify you about name changes of groups. If you have turned off the notification for “Changes the name of a group to which I belong,” you should do go here and turn on that notification. (And just to be sure, do the same thing for events)
• Think twice before you join a group. Even if you see the notification about the group change right away, perhaps you could avoid this issue by not joining certain types of groups.

Update 20/1/09:

I just found an update on Hans Kullin’s blog about what can happen: 200,000 Swedes joined fake Facebook group for Haiti