According to a report from Inside Facebook, people who really hate Timeline and are looking for ways to get rid of it are becoming victims of scams on the social network.
By searching for “remove Timeline” or “disable Timeline” on Facebook, you’ll find a slew of groups and pages promising step by step instructions on how to disable the new Facebook feature that just recently went live for everyone. There’s only one problem, disabling Timeline is impossible, and users who follow these instructions are being scammed.
Some of the scams don’t appear to be harmful, simply dropping you on a landing page asking you to like a few pages and in return your Timeline will magically disappear. Mind you, it seems like an obvious scam to those who are tech savvy, but for people who really don’t understand how Facebook works and don’t like the new feature, they’ll apparently try anything:
While liking things won’t do any technical damage, some scams are asking people to download and install extensions for their browser, and who knows what type of harm that could cause. For example, 14,068 people have liked this page that automatically prompts you to download an extension as soon as you do so:
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There’s no way to know how successful these scams have been or what they do to users exactly, but it’s best to keep an eye out for these types of things if one of your friends shares it with you. There’s no way to disable Timeline once you’ve said yes to trying it out, and it will be mandatory in the coming weeks. If you find one of these pages, you can simply click “Report page” in the bottom right hand side to help Facebook get rid of this junk.
If you really despise Facebook, you could always go back to using IE7, which is no longer supported by Facebook.
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