Facebook Troubles – Make Sure You Protect Your Privacy on Facebook

While there has been a lot of press lately regarding security lapses on Facebook and other social networking sites, it turns out the that user’s biggest enemy could be the person in the mirror. A fairly recent undercover study by the security firm Sophos had some results that you may or may not find surprising.

Sophos representatives created two fake Facebook identities. One, Daisy Felettin, is an anagram of “false identity.” The second is Dinette Stonily, an anagram of “stolen identity.” These “people” were able to become friends with a total of 95 Facebook members within the course of two weeks.

Neither “person” claimed to know the people it was trying to friend, and both profiles had pictures of animals on them instead of people’s faces; one a cat and one a plastic duck. There was no reason for the random people who received the requests to believe that they knew either of these “people” personally.

What is more alarming is that when these “people” gained their new “friends” these friends basically offered them their birth dates and other select details about their personal lives free of charge. What is even more alarming than that is that they also shared personal information of other people in their friends lists just by doing so.

According to Tom S. Noda of Computerworld Philippines, “Just under half of the 20-ish crowd, and just under a third of the 50-ish crowd gave away personal information about their friends and family.”
The best way to prevent this from happening to you is to stay off of social networking sites altogether, but if you just need to have your daily or weekly Facebook fix, be very careful who you’re friends with and what you share. Keep information like your address, your phone number and your date of birth off of your profile, even if you only have it visible to friends. You never know when someone will hack into the system and view it, even if you think you have it locked up tight.

Never agree to be friends with a person you don’t know, no matter how harmless this person seems. And don’t connect to brand pages or applications that may share your information with third parties, which, sad to say, is pretty much all of them.

If you need to share personal details with your friends, do it the old fashioned way; pick up the phone. Keep social networking at the level of casual acquaintances. Give very vague details about your life and talk about music, movies and the weather. Also, don’t become friends with people whose names are anagrams of “identity theft.”

Learn more about identity theft protection today.