This week, a viral “challenge” took Twitter and other social media by storm. The “Florida Man Challenge” called for people to:
- Google “Florida Man” and their birthdate,
- Find a headline about the activities of a “Florida Man” that matched their birthdate, and
- Post that headline to their social media account.
The challenge spread like a cat meme, so much so that typing “Florida Man” into the Google search bar resulted in suggested entries that were almost exclusively calendar dates.
When I walked into the @tb_times newsroom this morning, ALL of the top stories were about #FloridaMan. It was confusing until we realized why: Everyone is googling to see their Florida Man headline.
Of course, I wrote about it:https://t.co/nFMWQPbMRT
— Gabrielle Calise (@gabriellecalise) March 21, 2019
Doing this was, as we like to say at Ars, a really bad idea.
Sure, if you’ve locked your social media account down so that only friends can see your posts and information and that information already includes your birth date, this sort of thing is relatively harmless. But if you are posting in response to the Florida Man Challenge publicly, it offers others an opportunity for bad actors to collect information that includes your birthdate—just one more tool they can use to attempt to socially engineer their way into your accounts and other personally identifying or financial data. And once it’s out there, it won’t go away.
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