What’s Your Porn Name?

You’ve probably seen this joke make the rounds on Facebook a few times now. Take something like your mom’s maiden name, the street you grew up on, maybe the name of your first pet—put them together and what do you get? Your porn name! Hilarious, right? Wrong. Those questions are the same ones many websites use for their security questions to verify who you are. Oops.

There are other variants that pop up around themed holidays. What’s your Irish name, what’s your elf name, what’s your pilgrim name. Not all involve asking for full on responses, but even taking the first letters of the words can help narrow down the answers.

Clever isn’t it? Not all scams on Facebook are as obvious as the find out who’s viewing your profile one that pops up from time to time. What harm could their be in making a porn name? It’s funny! This just goes to show how even the simplest social media jokes can get you to lower your guard and expose more about you than you should.

These scams originate from innocent looking sites like Jokemail. The page gives people the options to post their response right to Facebook or prompts to “Spread the joke!!” on either Facebook or other social media outlets. Once someone shares the “joke” along with their porn name, others laugh, play along, comment with their results, and even share the joke too. The joke spreads and more people fall for it. Sounds like a scam to me.

What you don’t realize is once this gets into Facebook, all of the comments are public to the source. That means everyone who comments ends up pairing their real name and profile to the answers to the questions. Just like how “likes” are public, now so are your sensitive answers.

It’s no longer just about thinking before you click. It’s thinking before you do anything on social media. Something as harmless as “What’s Your Porn Name” might seem like a joke, but the only one really laughing is the guy who can hack your life now. Not so funny after all…