Some of you may have read a piece I wrote in August about Anonymous hackers threatening to destroy Facebook on November 5th of this year. If you didn’t read it here you will surely have heard about on some other tech site or blog.
As we’re getting ever closer to that date, I thought we’d take a look at what the situation is now. Well, to be frank, it’s all gone a little quiet. During the initial furore after ‘Operation Facebook’ was first announced, a rebuttal came from Anonymous. A member of the group known as Speakeasy, spoke to Gawker to clear up what he called “a terrible misunderstanding”: There was an “Operation Facebook”, he said, but it was dedicated to raising awareness about the company’s privacy and data hoarding practices instead of causing social media Armageddon.
Another indicator that Facebook may be spared an attack is the fact that Anonymous have announced that they are now planning to put their high powered hackers to work on bringing down organisations that provide hosting services to any website dealing with child pornography. So it looks like Anonymous may have risen up to tackle a more noble cause, rather than trying to take down a service that is used every day by over 700 million (for the most part) happy members.
Having said that, given their previous targets of corporate and big-business sites, it’s not safe to assume that Facebook will be left alone. Their main gripe was with privacy and how much of your information Facebook is sharing. Since the initial threat by Anonymous there have been many changes on Facebook that share even more of your private information.
So who knows? Will Facebook disappear on November 5th? We just don’t know. However, unlike the Houses of Parliament, we are in a position to be able to back up that which may be destroyed. If you are concerned about waking up on November 6th to discover that you’ve had your Facebook account deleted, then you can back it up with SocialSafe. This is exactly the sort of situation that we designed the app for. For more information about how you can go about backing up your online social life, visit the SocialSafe website.