Facebook Hacks?

Recently, I have been bombarded by requests to join an event on Facebook called "Color My Facebook". The event claims that if you join it, then you would be able to actually change the color of the facebook layout. I've been getting about fifteen of these every day for the past week. Many people claim that it is a hack. However, this is not the case.  According to Ryan Butler, (http://butlerjournalism.blogspot.com/), “Both Facebook and other social networks like Twitter have Dev API's that allow third parties access to account details. The respectable ones will display an option (Facebook forces this option for all account access scripts, but not browser-embed scripts). Twitter runs account scripts without confirmation.” What this means is that by clicking on these events, you give a third party that is not Facebook access to your account, which in turn is used to send more invites to all of your Facebook friends. It is like a virus. When I asked Ryan if resetting my password would simply fix the problem, he added: “Not entirely. Once you click the link, you allow access to your account. This access doesn't go away when changing your password. I believe there is some way to view your allowed accass and disable it, though. Check apps and privacy settings. Twitter is hopeless though, I think. Changing the password MAY fix the issue but I don't know enough about how their API works.”
                Essentially, the only way to not become affected by this “virus” is to not click on the links or the event. Simply declining the invite is enough. You need to be informed and vigilant when dealing with links on the internet. You should make sure to click on links to verified websites to avoid problems like this.

 Now, there is a way to actually change the color of your Facebook though. In order to do this, you will need Google Chrome and a Facebook account. While on Chrome, access the Web Store to install extensions and apps. Extensions are computer programs that extend the functionality of a web browser in some way. The extension we are looking for is located right here: Color My Facebook.
             Install the extension, and now you can change the color of your Facebook layout! I prefer this color changer extension over others due to its working color picker which other lack. I hope you take my advice and I hope you learned from this entry, thank you for reading.

~George