Over the last week or so your feed on Facebook might well have come up with something like this:
It comes from one of your friends with the title "LMFAO!!! SEE WHO VIEWED YOUR PROFILE!! Click Here -->..." If you are silly enough to think that your friends have turned into the sort of people who use the term "LMFAO" then you will foolishly click on the link.
It is of course the latest in a long line of Facebook stalker scams, once you click on the link and download the application; it then creates a fake picture and tags all of your friends in it, luring everyone in with the biggest Facebook taboo, revealing who has been snooping at your profile.
This is an interesting subject and a secret which Facebook has officially kept all these years. It would seem that our inner voyeurs are just as interested in who has been looking at our Facebook pages as we are in looking at other peoples. I know that for the period of my life in which I had to sit in an office for 8 hours a day I whiled away hundreds of hours looking through a friend of a friend's cousin's holiday photos from 2002. I would often come to a horrid realisation of what I was doing and just how much time I had wasted meandering down a random path within deepest darkest Facebook. But therein lies the joy, you can wander where you like without detection, it's like peeking in people's windows when the lights are on and the curtains aren't drawn - an intrinsic human curiosity. Likewise, it is also very interesting to us to find out who is interested in our own lives, but this is a dangerous game. If your ex pops up on the list you might be fooled into thinking they are still holding a little torch for you, if it's your boss then that stirs all kinds of paranoia, and what if one of your friends is checking your profile a little to often, are they obsessed? It's dangerous and that's why Facebook hasn't given over that power.
The Facebook Checker app is certainly the most accomplished scam as yet, tagging everyone's friends in a picture and posting it to everyone's news feed is a fast and effective way of making it viral.
Jessica Hazel is a writer, blogger and director of Smoking Gun Vintage
http://creativepool.co.uk/jessicahazel
