New Social Network Eschews Real Names and Email Addresses
|
|
CREDIT: Logo montage by SecurityNewsDaily
|
A new social-media platform called OnlyMeWorld.com promises users a Facebook-like experience without the privacy infringements that recently earned that social-media behemoth scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission.
Claiming that jettisoning real names is the only way to protect personal information, the Hawaii-based startup takes a pioneering stance on privacy issues it predicts will only get worse.
"The problem that I have with not only established network sites but even alternative ones is people keep missing the point on what anonymity, privacy, security is on the Internet and what it really means," said OnlyMeWorld President Carlson Yamamoto.
Anti-Facebook sites like Anybeat, Diaspora, and unthink.com "talk about privacy, but they only talk about what you don't want other users to see," he said. "That information is still in the database."
[Online Privacy Rights Bills Not Good Enough, Say Advocates]
Completely clean of cookies, OnlyMeWorld is also the only social network that does not require an email address to register, Yamamoto said. A new account page actively dissuades users from using their full name, except for "professional purposes."
These qualities, as well as free downloadable software that stops third-party companies such as Facebook and Google from tracking users on the network, makes OnlyMeWorld "the only safe social-networking site on the Web today," Yamamoto said.
Information like an email address and a name may seem like small change for users accustomed to sharing intimacies of their daily life with near-strangers in their network. But to a cyber criminal, these facts, along with date of birth, can often be enough to break into someone’s email account.
Once inside, a person or algorithm has access to a virtual "gold mine" of personal data, including bank information and passwords to other accounts, Yamamoto said. Facebook's constant stream of email notifications make an attack on someone's social network similarly simple, as each new message exposes one's username.
But even the most advanced security features in the world can't steal what isn't there in the first place. "A cyber criminal could hack our system 24/7 and there's nothing they can do," Yamamoto said.
The forward-thinking company has been in beta since April 2011 and expects to attract a population of users disenchanted with the other social networks available, including Google Plus, which launched this summer and garnered 50-million users in less than two months.
"We interpret that as people are not happy with Facebook. But at the same time they are not happy with Google. People are just sick of what is happening in the market today. They want to do these things but want their privacy and anonymity. These sites basically tell people, 'We don’t care.' A few weeks ago [Facebook founder] Mark Zuckerberg's belief was, 'We're big enough that if we make mistakes it doesn't matter.' That's very arrogant . . . It should be about choice," Yamamoto said.
According to Yamamoto, the true safety offered by OnlyMeWorld comes just in time. Data-mining practices that purport to track users anonymously for advertising research are in their infancy, but have the ability to archive personal data for decades.
