In “The Unofficial Facebook Blog”, author Nick O’Neill writes, “Creating false profiles of other people on Facebook has been a normal thing since the launch of the site four years ago.” He references an amusing College Humor video about creating fake Facebook profiles:
All joking aside, one could do significant personal or professional damage by spoofing somebody else on Facebook. That begs the question, how do you know your friends or colleagues are behind their purported Facebook identities? For that matter, how would you prove that your own Facebook profile belongs to you?
Facebook doesn’t offer a “verified profile” service. There does seem to be an opportunity here for a 3rd-party identity verification credentialing service. Honesty Online has looked at this opportunity. But how to build a robust solution, that is, one that provides a credential that itself can’t easily be spoofed, isn’t obvious. Our existing anti-spoofing security measures rely on close integration with the partner site offering our verification service, and can’t be directly reproduced on a neutral site such as Facebook.
So, today Honesty Online doesn’t offer an identity credential solution for user profiles on Facebook or other “neutral” (non-partner) sites. But I wouldn’t be writing about it if that weren’t likely to change in the not-too-distant future.
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