a fleeting stay ...

Facebook users in Malaysia readily accept "friendship" requests from strangers, says criminologist and Malaysian Association of Certified Fraud Examiners president Datuk Akhbar Satar. Malaysians should think twice about approving appeals for friendship from people they do not know, he says. Many feel good when they suddenly become "popular" as indicated by the numerous applications. They reveal a lot of themselves such as birth dates, addresses, telephone numbers and alluring photos to the so-called Facebook friends who now have access to these details which are found on the users' profile pages. They are particularly vulnerable to all kinds of abuse. Trusting Facebook users are everywhere. A friend from the Philippines recently picked up a message on Facebook from a man who wanted to be her friend. He told her that he was attracted to her profile picture on Facebook and pestered her with messages for more than a month. He began to wax lyrical abo...

Professor Shamsul Amri Baharuddin People who do not use Facebook fall into three broad categories. The first group is completely indifferent to it, the second finds it mildly irritating and the third dislikes it intensely. Malaysia's prominent sociologist Professor Shamsul Amri Baharuddin is of the last type. I made the mistake of asking Shamsul, who is director of the Institute of Ethnic Studies at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, if he was on Facebook, the social network which was hatched up in the dormitories of Harvard six years ago. "I have a face and I keep thousands of books. Why do I need Facebook?" How do you react to that reply? I didn't. I meekly invited him to elaborate on his reasons. "Facebook will take away my soul and I won't allow that to happen because I am a believer," says Shamsul fiercely, who launched into a tirade of accusations against Facebook. Ninety per cent of the things you read on Facebook are either p...