Social Media Scam Spreads Like Wildfires

If you haven't heard about the new social media application Formspring, you soon will.

Formspring is a site that allows anonymous users to ask questions about people you may be interested in. The questions range from what is your favourite colour to what are your life's ambitions. Users can post questions under the guise of anonymity. You have the choice to publish your answers to certain questions, or ignore them.



Recently, Formspring came under fire after a press release spread wildly across the Internet that the two creators were conspiring to sell your private information to other Internet sources. The press release came from the Associated Press, a seemingly credible source.






The scam was a scam. This story not only proved to be completely untrue but proof that anybody can post anything and people WILL believe it. It probed people to question the legitimacy of the sites they use and the applications they choose to divulge their information and at the same time proving that just because a credible name is attached doesn't make it true (sound familiar? Wikipedia's source credibility is questioned constantly)

Do you believe everything you read on the Internet?
Does this make you less likely to post your personal information to these 'harmless' sites?

Formspring me! But don't ask me questions you wouldn't want to know.