I was disappointed tonight when I discovered that Facebook has taken away my ability to spot fake Facebook accounts. Occasionally, the Facebook groups I administer get requests from suspicious-looking accounts. Often the spammers have recently joined Facebook and have appropriated the photo of another person for their profile photo. Usually the photo is for a hot-looking girl but not always.
When a request to join a group comes in from one of these questionable accounts, the first thing I do it to cut and paste the URL of their profile photo into Google Image Search (GIS). If the account’s fake, GIS will almost always pop up the name of the real person pictured in the photograph. Or there will be multiple hits, showing the same photograph is associated with multiple names. Either way, a Google Image Search has proven a quick way to sniff out fakes.
Facebook has changed the way they display photographs, though. Each image used to be a link to one of Facebook’s own Content Distribution Network (CDN) servers and could be displayed even without logging in to see it. As long as one had the image URL, one could see the image outside of Facebook.
Facebook has recently been adding a UUID (a unique identifier) to the end of each image URL. This UUID won’t work in GIS when it’s left on the URL and without the UUID, Facebook won’t display the image. With no way to turn GIS loose on verifying photos I’m left with having to trust Facebook (ha!) that the noobie asking for access is, in fact, an actual human.
Facebook gets less and less useful every day.