Dan Tynan

Miami-based Hey Dude Skin Care is on a mission to help men get “dudified” by taking control of their personal grooming. Like a lot of small businesses, it uses a Facebook page to promote its services. Within a relatively short time Hey Dude’s page, filled with photos of bikini babes and body builders, has garnered more than 11,000 fans.

But most of those fans are unlikely to get dudified any time soon, because most of them don’t really exist. Hey Dude’s Facebook numbers have been artificially inflated by a network of zombie accounts run by a bot master.

According to their Facebook profiles, Mandy Barnes, Jasmine Wilson, May Price and Mindy Bennett have a lot in common. So do Meredith Gonzales, Sonja Watson, Lucia Long and Meredith Baker.

They are all around the same age (early 20s) and attractive, but not in a supermodel kind of way. They are all Facebook friends, despite living in different areas of the country and attending different schools. Their favorite sport is, somewhat inexplicably, cricket. Their favorite movie is the even more obscure Arab Spring Wedding. They have all posted exactly three Facebook photos, and they all have the same favorite quotation.

Well, it’s now official: Facebook is planning to offer shares to the public starting this Friday at $34 to $38 a pop. Get yours while they’re hot.

What does this mean for Facebook and your data? Everything. But what it mostly means is that Facebook will be under enormous pressure to post ever increasing revenue numbers every three months. And there is only one source of revenue for Facebook, ultimately: Your data.

A little report in a New Zealand newspaper is getting a ton of attention over on this side of Middle Earth. It seems that Facebook is testing out a scheme in which ordinary users can pay for the privilege of promoting their own posts.

According to the Fairfax NZ News, an unnamed Facebooker in Whangarei was posted something to his Facebook page, then was startled to be asked if he wouldn’t mind paying $1.80 to “make sure friends see this.”

Nearly everyone on the Internet knows about Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos. Savvy geeks might even recognize Internet pioneers like Vint Cerf and Marc Andreessen.

But among the most powerful people on the Net are individuals whose names are unknown to the teeming masses on the InterWebs. Some of them control vital pieces of Internet infrastructure. Others decide which companies get funded, which websites get the lion's share of the traffic, or whether sites will live to see another day.

The biggest privacy problem with Facebook isn’t Facebook itself, it’s Facebook’s apps. There are more than 500,000 games, puzzles, quizzes and other time wasters in the Facebook platform, many of which exist for the sole purpose of sucking data out of your account. Worse, these apps not only can access your information, they can also grab data from your friends’ profiles, depending on their privacy settings. Thank you, obnoxious Farmville fans.

Facebook establishes limits about what data apps can access and what they can do with it, but they don’t appear terribly motivated to enforce those rules. For example, in October 2010, ten popular Facebook apps were found to be slurping up user data in direct violation of Facebook’s own terms. In response, Facebook removed some of those apps on a Friday, then reinstated them on the following Monday.

Have you heard of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act? If not, you’re in for a crash course. Leading privacy and civil rights groups have declared last week Stop Cyber Spying Weekin an effort to get the word out about CISPA – yet another meaningless acronym that threatens to redefine the Internet as we know it.

CISPA could be the most important piece of digital legislation since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And like the DMCA, which was written to thwart file sharers and DVD rippers but ended up being used to enforce copyrights on garage door openers and shut down blogs critical of corporations, it has at least as much potential for abuse.

Dirty IT jobs don't always look so dirty at first glance.

Dressing up like Tom Cruise in "Mission: Impossible" and breaking into a secured facility sounds like a blast -- until you're trapped for two hours in the freezing rain waiting to be rescued. Think writing sexy games would be fun? Imagine poring over endless photo sets of explicit anatomical closeups.

Is that Facebook hottie you just friended interested in more than just being friends? Yes, but not in the way you might hope. She’s probably after your data, and possibly much more.

In a TY4NS post about the scourge of Social Media Spam last week I noted how easy it is for scammers to create bogus accounts they can use for spammy purposes. Even allegedly tech savvy types can be taken in. Exhibit A: A Facebook account for one “Jessica Ceceli,” which used photos of beguiling Japanese adult star Maria Ozama to lure unsuspecting geeks – including some highly recognizable tech journos – into befriending her.

Managing your privacy online ain’t easy. Between Facebook, Google, the online tracking cartel and Big Brother, everyone wants a piece of your data. Figuring out who has which pieces of your personal info and what they’re doing with it is a challenge even for privacy geeks like me.

Most normal people just give up. That is, of course, exactly what they want you to do. (Who’s “they”? Fill in your favorite conspiracy theory here.) Now there’s a new tool that can help normal folks untangle the privacy knot. It’s called Priveazy, and it opened the doors on its public beta earlier this week.

The price of living on the InterWebs is that eventually you’re going to get hacked. And the longer you stay on the InterWebs, the more likely you’ll get hacked again. So it is with eSarcasm, the not-quite-award-winning satirical site I co-author with my partner in juvenility, JR Raphael.

A few weeks ago I was searching for something on eSarcasm and discovered that Google’s search results looked extremely disconcerting. The URLs were correct, but instead of the usual snarky headlines, two sentence excerpts, and page previews, Google had apparently substituted text like "Buy real viagra - Approved Online Pharmacy: always 10% off for all reorders, free samples for all orders, 100% quality, low prices, 24/7 support..."

What you say and do on social media can be used against you in a court of law. Don’t believe it? You may soon find yourself wearing an attractive orange jump suit or living out of a suitcase in a residential motel.

Since 2010 social media evidence has been used in more than 700 cases, per Dishon & Block Family Law Attorneys. Facebook alone is cited in more than 20 percent of American divorce cases, according to published reports.