What bugs me is not identity fraud but who will be watchdog to BBC’s Watchdog

A couple of weeks ago I got a request from someone called Amba wanting to be my Facebook friend. Without thinking much about it, I said yes — I usually do when people ask to be friends with me on social networking sites. The upshot is that Amba now has access to my Facebook profile — she can see, for instance, that my favourite novelist is Charles Dickens — and can send messages to all my other Facebook friends.

The following day I received an email from an assistant producer on Watchdog revealing that I’d been targeted as part of a story she was working on investigating social networking sites and identity fraud. Apparently, ‘Amba’ was a pseudonym she had adopted to see how many people would be incautious enough to become online friends with her. The idea was to demonstrate how easy it would be for a fraudster to gain access to people’s personal details and steal their identity.