Spending copious amounts of time on Facebook may make you more susceptible to being scammed, according to new research published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.
As part of the study, 150 US college students were asked to fill in a questionnaire, which included questions aimed at assessing their social media usage.
During the course of the next few months, the students received a Facebook friend invite from a phony account. Two weeks later the ‘friend’ asked them for information such as their student number, email and date of birth.
The study found that the students who spent more time on Facebook and had more Facebook friends were more likely to give away their personal information.
“Habitual Facebook use is an understudied issue and as such there are no interventions aimed at correcting it. We need to develop techniques to identify individuals who posses this problem early on, and we now know its behavioral and personality markers,” said study leader Professor Arun Vishwanath. “We need to next develop remedial interventions that target such individuals and help them develop better cyber-hygiene.
