Anonymous threats to bring down Facebook on November 5

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Anonymous threats to bring down Facebook on November 5

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Mark your calendars. Controversial hackers' group Anonymous recently released a YouTube video warning that they are going to shut down social networking site Facebook on November 5, the day when Guy Fawkes and the failure of the Gunpowder Plot is celebrated. You can see for yourself the YouTube video embedded below.

In the video, Anonymous claimed that they are going to attack Facebook in an activity dubbed as Operation Facebook for the latter's acts of selling personal information to various governments and other entities that could heavily benefit from a masterlist of Facebook users, which is estimated to be around 750 million people right now ever since Facebook started in 2004.

Anonymous, through the computerized voice in the video, also lamented that deleting one's account is impossible in Facebook, as the social networking site still retain personal information even though the account is supposedly deleted by the user. This undermines the privacy settings that users have been given--or have been supposedly given.

Hacktivist members of the group have been shown in the past to wear Guy Fawkes masks popularized by the movie V For Vendetta. The group has claimed responsibility for infiltrating various websites throughout the years, the most recent of which are those of the Syrian government. Anonymous hackers typically carry out their activities through Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, in which the hackers are going to send users so many packets of data that the user will be unable to connect to the Internet anymore.

Not all Internet users who associate themselves with the Anonymous movement are in favor of the threat, however.

For whatever their motivations are and no matter how true the allegations against Facebook are, there is no doubt that this recent threat is something done by juveniles at best. It is still an interesting bit of news, though. Let's see if the threat will become reality.

Do you think what Anonymous is planning to do is a justified act? Share us your thoughts.

You can talk about... Anonymous threats to bring down Facebook on November 5

Tags: • responsibility • masks • settings • privacy • information • attack • embedded • hackers • facebook • privacy settings • personal information • social networking •

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