Checking Who Views/Stalks/Checks Your Facebook Profile

One of the prolific types of scams or bait circulating Facebook over 2009 and 2010 are groups or applications purporting to offer the Facebook member either the opportunity to see who visits their Facebook profile or the ability to view otherwise private Facebook profiles.

These hoaxes usually circulate by getting members to either unwittingly install self-propogating Facebook applications that purport to offer the ability, or by requesting Facebook members join groups and invite their friends.

Either of these features are, of course, completely impossible to achieve as they violate Facebooks own privacy policy, which does not allow Facebook members activities to be monitored in such a way.

Furthermore, applications or groups that offer such features will usually have some malicious motive which is why they offer these seemingly attractive features in the first place. Facebook applications, for example, once installed, have been known to SPAM the victims entire friends list with misleading wall posts/status updates/Facebook emails/Facebook Chats/Notifications that are designed to bait the victims friends into installing the same application (or same application template) that will in turn cause the friend to be the next victim and start the malicious propogating cycle all over again.

Many victims may not even know that they have been duped, since many of these Facebook applications can present the victim with a list of their friends with the claim that those friends are their "top X stalkers" or the most regular vistors to the victims profile. In reality, the application has chosen X amount of random friends and put them in a list coupled with this false assertion. Again, applications do not have the ability to monitor a Facebook members activities like this.

Facebook groups offering these features can potentially be malicious in a variety of ways, including inciting Facebook members to unwittingly sign up for SMS Subscription scams that involve victims completing surveys on external sites, or the groups could contain malicious links to external sites that could install malware.

Either way, if you ever come across anything on Facebook that offers the ability to check who visits/stalks/checks your profile, or claims to let you see private profiles on Facebook, its fake and should simply be ignored.

UPDATE: Hopefully this is a threat that will soon come to a close, following the announcement by Facebook that any applications purporting to offer the feature of tracking who visits your profile will automatically be deleted. Read the BBC article here.

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