People Keep Falling For This Ridiculous Facebook Hoax

We need to talk about Facebook Privacy.

For much of human history, we've shared information - personal or otherwise - by walking from one place to another and using an assortment of languages to communicate. Sometimes it was to explain which berries would make your crap for a week, other times it was just to say 'Hello!" 

Eventually we got bored of walking and started writing things down, making it much easier to impart our wordy wisdom. Culture blossomed, business boomed.

And then the internet arrived.

Within the grand scope of things, the world wide web has been humanity's preferred information exchange medium for all of two minutes - which might explain why many of us are still totally confused about what we should use it for, what we should say on it, how privacy works.

Which means we keep doing stuff like this...

Messages like this appear on social networks at a rate of once every idiot cycle (which is almost the equivalent of a regular calendar year) - and we're currently in the middle of one. Head over to your Facebook account and have a browse, you'll probably find a few of the above messages splashed about.

It's a bizarre hoax, one that doesn't see any malicious party gain any cash (no one is advertising the aforementioned fake subscription service or setting up fake 'money links'), but rather, reveals the paranoid fear playing on the browsing habits of many internet users.

We don't quite know how internet privacy works, but we're pretty darn sure we want it - even to the extent of believing that a copy-and-paste status will keep our deepest, darkest (and boring) social exchanges secret. 

Facebook offered this in response to the latest privacy scare sweeping its pages, walls and inboxes.

Which essentially boils down to a corporate response of "Lol, silly users!"

What would be more helpful is posting a link to this page which explains Facebook's privacy policy in clear, simple words - largely free of weighty legal jargon.

Or they could have pointed you to this section of your Facebook tool bar, that gives you some shortcuts to your basic privacy settings.

The internet is young. We're all still getting used to using it. 

But the next time you see someone pasting a fear-laden status update addressing 'The Man' about privacy permissions and content ownership - do yourself a favour.

Unfriend them.