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Hacker group vows to 'kill Facebook'
Apparently, "Anonymous" won't be accepting your friend request.
Members of the shadowy collective known for its politically motivated Web hacks and attacks are targeting Facebook for what they claim to be the social-networking giant's misuse of personal information.
"Your medium of communication you all so dearly adore will be destroyed," the speaker said in a YouTube video, which was posted July 16 but started circulating widely this week.
Using a voice modulator to disguise his (or her) voice, the speaker, who purports to represent Anonymous, invites viewers to "join the cause and kill Facebook for the sake of your own privacy."
"Everything you do on Facebook stays on Facebook regardless of your privacy settings, and deleting your account is impossible," the speaker says. "Even if you delete your account, all your information stays on Facebook and can be recovered at any time."
The video also makes the unsubstantiated claim that Facebook has been selling user information to government agencies and giving it to security firms so they can spy on people.
A Facebook spokesman declined comment Tuesday on the alleged Anonymous plot.
But the site has repeatedly said it doesn't sell information and doesn't share user information with any third parties that the user hasn't approved.
"We do not share your personal information with people or services you don't want," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in an opinion piece for the Washington Post last year. "We do not give advertisers access to your personal information. We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone."
The announced date for the "operation," November 5, is Guy Fawkes Day, a commemoration of the Gunpowder Plot in which Fawkes and others placed explosives under the British House of Lords in 1605.
Anonymous's most common mode of operation is launching distributed denial-of-service attacks. In a DDoS, multiple people use scripts to repeatedly access a website, slowing it badly or shutting it down if its servers can't handle the traffic.
But it's apparent that everyone who's part of Anonymous -- which rose to prominence for supporting whistle-blower site WikiLeaks -- isn't up for attacking Facebook.
"FYI - #OpFacebook is being organised by some Anons. This does not necessarily mean that all of #Anonymous agrees with it," read a Twitter post Tuesday morning from @GroupAnon, a feed that has consistently posted about the group's activities.
By its nature, Anonymous is loosely organized, with no clear leadership structure.
It also remains an open question whether the group could muster enough help to take down, or slow, a site that boasts 750 million users and routinely hosts tens of millions of them every day.
In December, the group tried and failed to take down another Web giant: Amazon. The online retailer, which booted WikiLeaks from its web-hosting service, is known to have massive amounts of server space -- as does Facebook.
In the past few years, Anonymous has taken credit for disrupting a number of prominent websites, including those of PayPal, Master Card, Visa and the Church of Scientology.
As recently as Monday, the group claimed credit for hacking the site of the Syrian Defense Ministry, replacing its content with an anti-government message and the Anonymous logo.
Protesters in Syria have been demanding reforms, including true democratic elections and an end to President Bashar al-Assad's regime.
Source: CNN