Our main goal is to draw attention to questions concerning online privacy awareness.

We have seen too many examples where friends and relatives of ours have suffered from their lack of in-depth knowledge concerning their online presence. After some research we discovered  this is a wide spread problem. People have even lost their jobs over Facebook content. We wanted to do something about this.

Our method of choice only serves the purpose to prove our point and put emphasis on how easy it is to lose track of a part of your online presence. If we wouldn’t have communicated this way, our message would probably have fallen into oblivion the moment it got out.

So, what exactly did we do and how?

We discovered that many groups on Facebook are left without an administrator. All we needed to find these groups was one quick Google search. The search results also revealed many groups that already had been hijacked by various people. Their intentions remain unclear.

So we simply joined 289 open groups and made ourselves administrators. We did not hack anything. Once we were administrators we owned the groups and could have changed any setting. We chose to change the picture, the name and the description of every group. Our intention was and is to restore these groups to their original form and find a suitable admin among the members. To be able to do this, we first backed up all the data we wanted to replace.

During the process we broke the terms of service, as defined in the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities of Facebook, and were rightfully banned:
§ 4.1  ”You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission”.

We created fictive accounts for one reason: we wanted to put focus on our message rather than our persons. It also eased the process of joining and administrating this large number of groups.

Feel free to form your own opinion.

Take control.


Contact us: controlyourinfo@gmail.com