Social media means personalized spam?

I ate breakfast this morning with some folks from BitDefender, a Romanian anti-virus company. Part of the conversation was the potential for personalized spam that appears to come from friends, not in email, but on Facebook, Twitter or other online social networks. It hasn’t happened yet, that they’re aware of, but they expect it will. Then CNET highlighted a possible problem with Facebook’s groups. If the problem is described accurately, it would be easy enough for spammers to take over an inactive Facebook group and create personalized spam notes from it.

Facebook appears to have responded, not to the writer, but in the comments. That’s an interesting way for a company to get its message out without being filtered by the press. But it’s counting on people reading the comments and also on  them believing that a comment is genuine. On the Internet, nobody knows if you’re really just a dog.