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Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and even Craigslist are all sites that can lead to great benefits, but you must protect yourself.
Much like having a debit or credit card, these tools are extremely helpful and convenient. You wouldn’t just give a person your pin code or credit card data would you? The most important thing about social networking sites is being in the know. A rather tragic event occurred on May 11, 2010, when a father of two boys decided to sell a diamond ring on Craigslist. Rather than meeting at a public location, he gave the soon to be murderers his home address, which resulted in the loss of his life.
Obviously Facebook has been all over the news lately, especially about their lack of security as they become more open. It’s very simple to simply blame Mark Zuckerberg, but Facebook is no longer under his thumb. Recently Facebook has once again initiated a push to make all information on the site readily available to the pubic. Even worse for Facebook’s image, is the released private messages held between Mark and an undisclosed person.
Mark: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Mark: Just ask.
Mark: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?
Mark: People just submitted it.
Mark: I don’t know why.
Mark: They “trust me”
Mark: Dumb fucks.
Regardless of what Mark used to say and was is clearly evident in how Facebook currently runs, there are still ways to protect your information. Also, the reason why a majority of these privacy concerns are coming into play is simply because Facebook is spreading it’s roots in many websites with their new “Like” feature.
The information Facebook is collecting for free, is equivalent to what ad agencies pay millions, if not billions per year to collect. Whether or not you want Facebook to gather this intelligence and then deliver you ads is up to how much information you place on their site.
Frankly as a person with a marketing background, I could care less. Ads are easily ignored or blocked, but the simply face remains, don’t put things online anywhere that you don’t want people to see. Prime example, Mark’s instant message conversation.
Protecting Yourself on Facebook
Don’t worry about changing your password every 30 days, because a good one will already be hard enough to crack. The biggest issue with people gaining access to your account is through phishing. If someone sends you a strange link in a Facebook message and it brings you to a login screen, it is more than likely a phishing site and just stole any information you provided it.
Phishing sites work by playing on peoples ignorance. By being in the know, you will greatly reduce any issues that could arise on any social networking site. Example: www.facebook.com is a proper domain. www.facebook.omnom.com is a possible phishing site. Any slight alterations to a domain name will mean you are on a separate application.
Screen shot of EvO's Facebook page
Seen above is a simple screen shot of EvO’s Facebook page. You will already notice it looks pretty much live everyone else’s; however, when anyone actually views it, it will look like the picture below.
What non-friends see
What everyone else sees on your Facebook account, or your public information matters a great deal. As you can see above, it just simply provides where I work, my grad school and that I live in Washington DC. All of this is basic information that I do in fact want online, so Google can pick it up for future employers and companies looking to place ads on our site (so they know I’m not such some strange hacker stealing money).
Public profiles, not a good idea
Unfortunately for our friend Jeet (by friend we mean we have no idea who this guy is) simply stumbling upon his profile provides far more information that anyone probably would want. Not only do we know what type of boxers the kid is wearing, we also can see that hey may be illiterate and having trouble with the ladies. Sorry Jeet.
Privacy tab
To access your privacy information, mouse over “Account” and down to “Privacy Settings” and the profile information or contact information. From here you will want to lock down everything you want to keep private. Even if your friends are trustworthy on Facebook, it doesn’t mean their account can’t be compromised to steal your information.
Granted there is a good chance this sounds like paranoia, but honestly if you have images of you getting hammered in college and end up running for some small town position, chances are you have already doomed yourself; of course it couldn’t hurt to be transparent anyways.
Placing your friends in specific groups will also help you use all of Facebook’s tools without being too paranoid. If you have a group for your close friends, it’s easy to provide them with all of your information while locking out your old high school chums.
We will go into placing your contacts into groups next week and how to reduce divulging to much information on Twitter. I’m personally not a great example of locking down social networking sites because I prefer to remain transparent, aside from the pictures of keg stands done at Georgia Southern (if the Pope visited he would have done it too). It’s life people, try to relax and use common sense, even if it’s not that common.
If you have any particular issues with social networking security, e-mail us at owner@play-this.org. An EFM associate will be happy to provide free information to anyone looking to increase their security and ability to use the Web.
[MSNBC]
