A recent study by Consumer Reports show that millions of people who use social networks, like Facebook and MySpace, expose sensitive personal information and put themselves and their families at risk. The study showed that
- about 9 percent of social network users were abused in some form, like malware infections, scams, identity theft, or harassment.
- most users are naive about privacy and its implications to identity theft. About 40% of the users had posted their full birth date and 26% of Facebook users with kids posted their children’s names and photos.
Things to Stop Doing in Facebook: Online Safety Tips
The report also said it is easy to prevent the crimes on social network.
Protecting the vast majority of consumers doesn’t require developing any technology, as contending with viruses and spyware did during the past decade. It requires the networks themselves to keep improving their privacy practices and better educating users.
In addition, Consumer Reports came up with a list of things not to do on Facebook to protect themselves and their families.
- Don’t leave your full birth date in the profile
- Never overlook the useful privacy controls
- Don’t post your child’s name in photo caption
- Never mention that you are not at home
- Never let search engines find your profile
- Don’t permit your young child/teenager use the Facebook unsupervised
The Consumer Reports study was done in January, much before Facebook rolled out the Open Graph and “Like” feature. It will be interesting to find the effect of Open Graph on the security of Facebook users.
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- Facebook Revamps its Profile Page and Adds Music and More Social Apps
- HP Wi-Fi Mouse Goes Social and Gets a Facebook Button
- Microsoft Office Goes Social and Joins Facebook
- MySpace Tries To Make Use of Facebook Bashing