Social Network Security
On the Internet, social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are immensely popular. People form networks of friends, and they share information with those friends. They also share information with their friends' friends, and often, everyone who happens by your personal pages on the site. This is great fun for those who enjoy the interaction with their circle of friends and others.
This has become a feeding ground for hackers looking for personal information so they can use it for identity theft. Protect yourself from those grazing the site looking for your personal information. The computer press, and even popular publications have been spreading the warnings about this. Here are some suggestions:
- Never ever mention your vacation plans online. Never mention that you are planning to be away from home or that your family or friends have plans to be away in messages to your friends online.
- Never state your physical or e-mail address where people can see them on social networking sites.
- Be sure only your confirmed friends can find you in a search of the site. Set the privacy controls so that only your friends have access to any of your information, pictures, or messages.
- Don't use your child's name in photo tags. If someone else does, delete it by clicking the remove tag.
- If you have posted your full birth date on your page, edit it so that only the month and day appear. Remove the year. Also don't divulge this information about your children, or grandchildren.
- Use a strong password. Your password should have at least eight characters. A good plan is to insert numbers and symbols in the middle. Another plan is to make a password of random characters including upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols. Keep that in a text file on your computer and when it's needed paste it into the password box.
- Be sure and set the privacy controls so that only your confirmed friends can access your information.
- Don't permit youngsters to use Facebook unsupervised.