Showing posts with label fake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fake. Show all posts

8/3/12

83 million Facebook accounts are fakes and dupes





CNN) -- If you're using a fake name on your Facebook account, maintaining a personal profile for your beloved pet or have a second profile you use just for logging in to other sites, you have one of the 83.09 million fake accounts Facebook wants to disable.
In an updated regulatory filing released Wednesday, the social media company said that 8.7 percent of its 955 million monthly active users worldwide are actually duplicate or false accounts.
"On Facebook we have a really large commitment in general to finding and disabling false accounts," Facebook's chief security officer Joe Sullivan told CNN in a recent interview. "Our entire platform is based on people using their real identities."

So what are those 83 million undesired accounts doing? They're a mixture of innocent and malicious, and Facebook has divvied them up into three categories: duplicate accounts, misclassified accounts and "undesirable" accounts.
Duplicate accounts make up 4.8% (45.8 million) of Facebook's total active member tally. According to the network's terms of service, users are not allowed to have more than one Facebook personal account or make accounts on behalf of other people. Parents creating Facebook accounts for their young kids are violating two rules, since people under 13 are not allowed to have Facebook profiles.
Misclassified accounts are personal profiles that have been made for companies, groups or pets. Those types of profiles (22.9 million) are allowed on Facebook, but they need to be created as Pages. Facebook estimates that 2.4% of its active accounts are these non-human personal accounts. These accounts can beconverted into approved pages without losing information. Pets such as Boo, the self-anointed "world's cutest dog," are typically classified as Public Figures.
The third group is the smallest -- just 1.5% of all active accounts -- but most troublesome. There are 14.3 million undesirable accounts that Facebook believes have been created specifically for purposes that violate the companies terms, like spamming.
Face it, Facebook: Sometimes you suck
"We believe the percentage of accounts that are duplicate or false is meaningfully lower in developed markets such as the United States or Australia and higher in developing markets such as Indonesia and Turkey," the company said in the filing. The tallies were based on an internal sampling of accounts done by reviewers, and Facebook says the numbers may represent the actual number.
Facebook disables any false accounts it finds, and while it wipes all the information associated with the name from public view, it doesn't delete the account from its servers "for safety and security" reasons. The disabled account goes into a sort of Facebook limbo, where the owner of the account can't get their hands on any of the content -- photos, posts, videos -- not even by requesting a copy of the data, according to Facebook.
If Facebook does shut down your account, it says you can't create a new one without permission from the company.

8/22/11

Fake Apple stores in China - photo

Fake Apple stores in China

China, known for producing counterfeit consumer gadgets and clothing, has reached a new piracy milestone — fake Apple stores.

 

8/9/11

Report: Fake Apple stores being forced to cover up



With a U.S. lawsuit over fake Apple retail stores in its infancy, officials in Beijing have taken steps to keep lookalike Apple retail stores in the region from fooling passers by.
China Daily reports that the city is making a concerted effort to keep unauthorized retailers from using Apple's iconic logo, as well as its related brand names from the exterior of stores. The crackdown will last a month, but as the outlet notes, it's not keeping the look-alike stores from doing business as usual on the inside.
"As of Sunday, the response to the ban from unauthorized Apple sellers had been sluggish, with some owners merely covering their Apple logos with blank sheets of paper, or just covering part of the Apple logo, and employees at unauthorized retailers could still be seen dressed in T-shirts bearing the Apple logo," China Daily said.
Following last month's buzz about the fake shops--which was spurred by photos and details of a look-alike shop in Kunming--a city in southwest China--local officials ended up closing down two stores. A Reuters report noted that that same investigation, which had led to the closures, found that all five stores in the area were selling Apple-made hardware that had been purchased from third-party authorized resellers. A follow-up by American blogger BirdAbroad (who posted information about the Kunming shop), highlighted several more such stores, including ones in the U.S.
While Apple so far has refrained from commenting on the grouping of shops, a trademark infringement lawsuit it filed in the U.S. two weeks ago would suggest the company's been busy behind the scenes. That suit, filed in New York, takes aim at three companies and some 52 other individuals. One of those is Apple Story Inc., believed to be the match of a similarly named Apple retail look-alike in Flushing, N.Y.
As mentioned in previous coverage, Apple's retail business makes for a tantalizing target for parties looking to cash in on the company's growing brand. Apple's stores generated $3.5 billion in revenue during the most recent fiscal quarter, up 36 percent from the $2.57 billion during the same quarter the year before. During its fiscal third-quarter earnings call, the company noted that of the 325 stores that were open, the average revenue per store was $10.8 million, with 73.7 million visitors walking through the doors.
Apple is quickly approaching 330 stores worldwide, four of which are currently in China, including its flagship store in Beijing, the same city this crackdown is now taking place.

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