Identity Thieves’ Reliance on Triadic Closure
In the contexts of the real and social media worlds, the term “friend” often does not refer to the same type of relationship. One’s friends in the real world usually consist exclusively of people whom the individual knows fairly well and has face-to-face contact with on a somewhat regular basis. While one’s friends on social media likely include these real-world friends, certain people whom the individual has never met offline or may know relatively little about also gain access as this person’s friend. This lack of personal connection with friends on social media is largely due to the principle of triadic closure.
Individuals often befriend their friends’ friends on social media. The connection established between two people as a result of having a mutual friend can in itself be a reason for the two to become friends. This can be modeled in a graph with nodes A, B, and C that represent three different people. Say, for instance, B is friends with both A and C, a first edge would link B with A and a second edge would link B with C. Eventually, A and C might decide to become friends as a result of having a mutual friend, B, and a third edge would be drawn to link A with C. The befriending of A and C as a result of their connection to B is an example of triadic closure, which is represented graphically by the addition of the link between A and C to form a triangularly-shaped network.
In practice, triadic closure may seem relatively harmless and rather advantageous for establishing valuable friendships on social media. With triadic closure at play, however, social media has become a platform for identity thieves to steal people’s personal information. As is described in the article “BBB: Con Artists Use Social Media to Befriend Strangers, Steal Identity,” such criminals create fraudulent social media profiles and befriend others with the goal of establishing even more connections based on the premise of mutual friends. If in the aforementioned scenario, person C was one of these criminals, A might still become friends with C, due to their mutual connection to B, without ever knowing C’s true identity. Thus, a link would be created between A and C, and triadic closure would give the criminal access to any and all of the personal information that is shared in A’s profile.
This criminal practice of coercing people into exposing their personal information has been dubbed “farcing” and is an ever-present threat in the digitally-connected age of the twenty-first century. Instances of farcing have occurred on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus, and one study even determined that one in five users of social media will accept strangers’ friend requests. Facebook employs the concept of mutual friends to compile a list of “people you may know” for each of its users. This convenient feature thereby increases the likelihood of triadic closure occurring and identity thieves discovering people’s demographic backgrounds, birthdates, and employment and family histories. With a mother’s maiden name, criminals can then access someone’s addresses, phone numbers, and other highly private information. Visually, triadic closure may be depicted as just a single link connecting two nodes, but the repercussions it can lead to in certain cases are much more complicated.
Source: http://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/science_and_technology/technology/bbb-con-artists-use-social-media-to-befriend-strangers-steal/article_e88e4cf2-3ece-5c12-9082-22bb7425f4bf.html