Your Facebook friend could be fake

Facebook has noted that 83 million accounts on their social network are fake.

This comes after a 10-Q filing that showed that 8.7% of their users are not real people. Out of this number 4.8% are accounts that have been duplicated, 2.4% are user-misclassified and 1.5% are spam accounts.

While this has been suspected for some time, according to Mashable, Facebook had estimated that the number of fake accounts were only about 5% to 6% – about 40.3 million to 50.7 million. Mashable also reports that Facebook says it bans at least 20 000 accounts daily and suspects that about 600 000 accounts per day are compromised. If you’ve ever had someone hack into your account and post arbitrary things all over you friends walls, you’ll be able to believe that.

In a delightful timeline on Mashable, you can see how Facebook has evolved since its launch in 2005 in terms of interface, interaction, design and features. You may have forgotten about the Facebook gifts that you could send your friends on their birthdays, launched in 2007, or the Publisher tool bar to publish a status or link to another profile, launched in 2008. More recently, in 2011, was the introduction of Facebook’s timeline look, which is set to become a permanent feature soon.

So what does it mean if 83 million accounts on Facebook are fake? Well it shows that the social networking site has a quite a tough time controlling their lot. Privacy and security settings may also not be quite up to scratch if 600 000 accounts per day are compromised.

The moral of the story? Keep checking your security settings on Facebook. If you don’t want strangers having access to your photographs and personal details, make sure only your friends are able to view your photographs, posts and likes. If you don’t want your boss to see what you get up to on a Friday night, don’t invite him or her as a friend. Also don’t be surprised if a status update about bunking work or hating your job gets you fired. Lastly and most importantly, make sure that you do not accept friend requests if you do not recognize the name. Having less friends on Facebook is far less important than compromising your safety on the internet.

Follow this five-minute Facebook security check to make sure you’re never in danger online.