Facebook Teams with McAfee, Offers Users Security

Facebook announced on their blog that they will be partnering with security giant McAfee to help protect their 350 million users from malware by offering quite a few perks to registered users of the social networking site.

To begin with, each Facebook user will be able to use the McAfee security suite free for six months. After this period is up, they will be offered continued protection at a discounted rate. Additionally, they will be adding a great deal of security related content to their site to help educate their users about security related issues.

To round out their new security policy, users who have had their accounts compromised will be required to go through a remediation process where their computer is scanned for malware. Any infections found through this process will be cleaned before the user is able to access Facebook. This is an attempt to prevent further disasters such as the recent embarrassment from FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s  Facebook page being hijacked to send out spam to all his “friends”.

Getting the software

As a Facebook user, you can take advantage of this offer for the free six month subscription by logging into Facebook and visiting their security page. From here, click on the “Protect your PC” tab in the upper right hand corner. From here, you simply become a fan of McAfee and you can download the security suite.

However, before you can download this software you will need to provide a credit card because the subscription will automatically renew at the end of the six month period and charge you at a discounted rate, 30% of the standard McAfee subscription price. You can cancel at any time, but you will no longer be able to update the software with the latest signature files that identify malware.

Of course this is quite  marketing boon for McAfee with Facebook handing them truckloads of potential customers on a silver platter.

Secure computing?

Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s VP of global communications, marketing and public policy made the statement that, “Keeping the Internet secure requires that users, security vendors and Internet companies all work together.” Nothing could be further from the truth.  Although I do think that Facebook has made great strides towards holding the user accountable for making sure that their computer does not infect, or attack, others. So in a way, my hat goes off to them.

Unfortunately, Facebook hasn’t been completely unscrupulous with their user base when it comes to protecting their personal content. It wasn’t too long ago that the terms and conditions were rewritten to state that Facebook could use any content on their network in any way they saw fit. This was quickly amended when their users revolted, however just recently they opened up their users’ lives again by permitting Google to search the status updates of public profiles. Again, they found themselves backtracking.

So while I applaud their efforts to make the Internet a safer place, the requirement to scan a computer as part of the remediation process is a cause for concern. True, I don’t want someone spreading malware and spam over a network of over 300 million people, but I also don’t want to put more power in the hands of a company whose track record for user privacy hasn’t quite been exemplary.