Facebook IPO comes with a health warning

Graham cluley
Graham Cluley
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Facebook’s IPO is the most hyped initial public offering in years, with much speculation about just how many billions of dollars the social networking phenomenon will be valued at.

There’s no doubt that 27-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, is going to become a very rich man – and will be able to buy an even larger wardrobe of hoodies.

So, congratulations to Zuck and his management team. Although we have often had our concerns about Facebook when it comes to their stand on privacy and security, there’s no doubt that they’ve done something extraordinary in commercial terms.

Facebook was only started seven years ago in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm, and has gone on to claim more than 800 million users across the planet, most of whom have willingly shared their private information to feed a hungry advertising monster.

In short, more than 10% of the world’s population are freely telling Facebook what they’re reading, what movies they like, who they are friends…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.

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