Haven’t seen anyone do this yet on Facebook, so I thought I’d stir the pot and see if this Facebook prank spreads.
Facebook Assault Tagging
Facebook is nice enough to automatically publish any photo of you to all your friends if someone simply tags a photo of you. This has caused embarrassing moments for many people, but there’s a way to guarantee embarrassment:
1) Upload a funny or nasty photo
2) Tag it as your friend
3) All their friends will see the new photo feed of your victim.
4) Watch their friends start commenting on the hilarious photo
5) Prepare to be tagged yourself (you can untag a photo of you, but you have to be on it).
Here’s my first:
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Ah, a funny joke to be sure. And certainly, if you hadn’t started it, someone would have at some point. But these sorts of things are what lead services like Facebook to have to implement restrictions (such as requiring users to approve tags in photos) that make the whole process more cumbersome.
Of course, the other view can be taken: you’re a white-hat “hacker” exposing potential issues with Facebook so they can set up safeguards (like my example above) before any “real” damage might occur.
This is the sort of thing I’d expect to see on MySpace with its younger-skewed demographic. But time–and the sort of people you’ve friended–will demonstrate how wide spread this tactic will become.
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:34 pm
[...] I ran across a strange photo tag on Facebook the other day: the rear-end of a horse tagged “Joe has such a pretty face” that had been associated with another person with whom I’m friends on the social-networking site. Luckily, it was just another friend of ours, Dustin—himself a savvy web user and analyst—pushing the envelope. You can read his post on the subject, which he aptly calls “assault-tagging” at his blog, Web Connoisseur. [...]
November 6th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
And it doesn’t have to be mean-spirited…. I tagged a flock of flamingoes as being my husband since he has a running joke about them. He took the pic and made it his profile. Our son tagged a pic of himself as being my sister since they looked a bit alike.