June 11, 2011

5 Hidden dangers of Facebook

Experts in online privacy drew attention to the five dangers of sharing information on social networking site Facebook. Marketing efforts by the company often results in a compromise on account holders' privacy. Whereas improper privacy setting may also expose your private information to all connected to you.

Goodchild noted five risks of using Facebook. They are:

  1. Your information is being shared with third partiesWhen you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting.The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” ... Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page. If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection."

  2. Privacy settings revert to a less safe default mode after each redesignPrivate email addresses that many Facebook users wanted to keep hidden were revealed publicly on a multitude of Facebook profiles. Though the glitch was later resolved by Facebook.

  3. Facebook ads may contain malwareRecently, a Facebook event invitation was reportedly sent to some over 2,300 friends of Jim Breyer, Accel Partners venture capitalist who sits on Facebook's board of directors, asking "Would you like a Facebook phone number?" However, the message was actually a scam and the users who entered their passwords in response to the message in turn sent the whole thing to their friends lists too.""
    This was a phishing scam and Jim's account appears to have been compromised," read a statement from Facebook as provided to venture industry news site

  4. Your friends unknowingly make you vulnerableAllow users to snoop on their friends' private chats, and view their pending friend requests. Though Facebook patch this major security bug on 6th May.

  5. Scammers are create fake profilesThe site manipulates privacy settings to make users' personal information available for commercial use.

No comments:

Post a Comment