Men most likely to friend dodgy Facebook strangers

Men are more likely to be suckers for Facebook scams than women, according to a new survey by Bitdefender, and it's usually because they're hitting confirm on friend requests accompanied by pictures of hotties in bikinis.

Female Facebook users tend to avoid temptation when faced with attractive photos of strangers - either male or female - and are less likely to accept friend requests from randoms.

A survey of 1,649 men and women in the UK and the US confirmed that everyone polled was aware of online privacy settings but that women were more likely to pay attention to them when using Facebook.

"Men expose themselves to risks more than women, especially when accepting friendship from unknown persons," said Bitdefender senior social media security researcher George Petre. The study found:

• 64.2 per cent of women always reject friendship requests from strangers on social networks while only 55.4 per cent of men did so.
• 24.5 per cent of men leave their social network accounts searchable by strangers, compared with 16 per cent of women.
• 25.6 per cent of men share their location while 21.8 per cent of women do so.

On a more general note, Petre highlighted the problems of location sharing - now enabled by default on many mobile apps - "most social network applications, especially the mobile ones, are designed to share this information by default, which opens the door to embarrassing if not truly dangerous situations". ®