Needless to say, but this would be illegal in the European Union. Unsolicited text messages and all that. If this is true, facebook should be very careful about doing it in EU.
This article is kind of only half-thought through. Facebook is making contact to the user on behalf of this person that claims to be 'advancetehri', it is not a 'cold' invite by Facebook. This user 'advancetehri' used the invite a user feature and put this person's number in.
Evil plan to grab new users? No.
I feel like a vast majority of people take every single chance they get to argue that Facebook is out to get them.
Guess your comment is actually half-thought. I'm the person this blog post is talking about. And I'm pretty sure, I (and none of us in my family) even remotely know this 'advancetehri' guy. And who the hell has a name like that?
Also, when I clicked that link and when @iambibhas clicked that link, we both got immediate friend request from 'advancetehri'. (We blurred the link because it exposes the full phone number to anyone who clicks it) Rings a bell?
You really don't get the point? Friendship request is an action From one user(say B) to another user(say A). Person A got sms because B sent a friend request to A only!
Why the hell would I or @rish404 get a friend request from person B is we click that link? The link is a notification sms of an event, it should not contain an action that says "Send friend request to anyone who clicks this link from person B".
Do you now understand my point?
Speculation: When someone generates friend requests e.g. by allowing Facebook to mine their address book, FB only has to generate a single friend request ID. (I'm not saying this is the "right" way to do this.)
You need to do a better job of blurring (or just black-boxing). I didn't really try, but it appeared I was able with a bit of effort to make out faint images of the blurred characters.
There's definitely a pile-on effect happening. Consider that story about click fraud a few weeks back. As far as I can tell click fraud isn't any worse on Facebook than it is on any other ad network, but they took a disproportionate amount of heat.
I think it's a combination of the over-priced, under-performing stock, advertisers realizing that fb isn't that great of an ad platform that makes the shine come off of FB and make stuff like this seem less acceptable than it would have just a couple months ago.
If we're thinking of the same article, it wasn't about click fraud, but rather a unique-to-Facebook class of users that heavily devalues click-throughs on Facebook ads.
They are looking a for a positive spin they can give to wall-street. If they release new stats on user growth still exploding to wall-street, that might reduce the hammering of their stocks. Sheer desperation as tough times call for desperate measures.
As of the FB app on my iPhone, when I wanted to connect it with my phones data (to get extra phone numbers of my friends, and see their profile pics), I was asked to agree that the app can upload the data to FB and let them use it whatever way they want to. (Read: all the phone numbers in my phone, not in the FB app.) That really blew my mind. I didn't agree, but if 500 people have your phone number in their phones, the chance that none of them agrees is zero.
This is the only way the number could've slipped into Facebook servers. Still, sending fake friend request SMSes to the user when they don't even have an fb account is totally unethical.
