Collabio: a game for annotating people within social networks - summary

Collabio stands for collaborative biography This article is about enhancing the current social networking tagging system; essentially turning it into a game. The purpose for making tagging into a game is to encourage users to provide accurate information about themselves and their friends. The game gives out points to users who can correctly guess the tag of one of their friends. Users get an extra point if they guess a tag already guessed by another user. Users can manage tags created for them and by them this feature helps to improve accuracy as a user can untag items that are not correct. The game allows for the expansion of its user base and retains the current users. For every one user tagging an other user, they received 11 tags in return. Basically the game is engineered to gather as much data of individuals as possible.




I believe this type of game is deceptive because it offers a point system to trick a user into giving out semi personal information. This gathered information could be used to hack into users accounts. For example on some bank websites a user can recover their password by typing in a correct answer to a security question. Some questions include where you went to school or the name of your pet. Therefore a hacker just needs to login and view the tags and can easily determine where you went to school and access your account. This just seems like a new method of phishing and once the information hits the internet it can never be removed.

Article by:
Michael Bernstein1, Desney Tan2, Greg Smith2, Mary Czerwinski2, Eric Horvitz2
1 MIT CSAIL
32 Vassar Street, Cambridge MA 02139
msbernst@mit.edu
2 Microsoft Research
One Microsoft Way, Redmond WA 98052
{desney, gregsmi, marycz, horvitz}@microsoft.com