Facebook source of antifraud protections?

It appears that banks are utilizing the “publicly available information” from social networking websites such as Facebook when verifying whether a credit card customer is “real.”  According to this article from Computerworld, a security expert, Roger Thompson, had to answer questions about his daughter-in-law to verify that he was the real Roger Thompson whose credit card was stolen.   When he asked the anti-fraud person where he got this information, he was told it was all “publicly available information.”

That is the information the Facebook allows anyone to see and its also the security hole in their privacy settings as a third-party application is treated as a friend and subject to those securities settings which allows a window into a person’s online profile that they could well imagine they had locked down.

Tags: antifraud protections, Facebook, Linkedin, social networking