Social networking sites have raised huge concerns regarding how safe our personal information really is. Sites like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter encourage members to create and update their personal profiles, so members can search for others who share their same preferences. Although these sites offer some degree of a personal privacy setting, you can allow members accepted as “friends” to access your personal information. In the article titled “Slapped in the Facebook: Social Networking Dangers Exposed”, an experiment was conducted to prove just how easy it is to hack into a “friend’s” profile.
The article cites several examples of how personal information can be obtained through these social networking sites. The authors also provide ways to prevent your personal information from being compromised. Many of their tips involve knowing who you are accepting as a friend, and not arbitrarily accepting friend requests. Hackers have discovered that they can create fake profiles to befriend people on social networking sites and gain access to their personal information. Sites like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter allow anybody to create a new profile using only a valid e-mail address. These sites do not validate any of the personal information that members provide to update their profile. With this knowledge, hackers can easily create profiles under an alias using a well-known name.
Social networking sites are a great way to keep in contact with friends, family, and business associates. However, you should never assume that everyone utilizing these sites is doing so with trustworthy intentions. Once your personal information is infiltrated, hackers can use that information to access all of your Web 2.0 sites. Perhaps social networking sites should increase their privacy policies to better protect their members. These sites should invest more resources in determining which profiles contain false information, and prohibiting the existence of false profiles on their site. On way to accomplish this would be to require members to provide valid credit card information before their account is activated. Many of the social networking site members are under the age of 18 and do not likely have their own credit card yet. For children looking to create a profile, a parent’s credit card would have to be used to establish the account. Hopefully, this policy change would also encourage parents to monitor the Internet activity of their children.
The article cites several examples of how personal information can be obtained through these social networking sites. The authors also provide ways to prevent your personal information from being compromised. Many of their tips involve knowing who you are accepting as a friend, and not arbitrarily accepting friend requests. Hackers have discovered that they can create fake profiles to befriend people on social networking sites and gain access to their personal information. Sites like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter allow anybody to create a new profile using only a valid e-mail address. These sites do not validate any of the personal information that members provide to update their profile. With this knowledge, hackers can easily create profiles under an alias using a well-known name.
Social networking sites are a great way to keep in contact with friends, family, and business associates. However, you should never assume that everyone utilizing these sites is doing so with trustworthy intentions. Once your personal information is infiltrated, hackers can use that information to access all of your Web 2.0 sites. Perhaps social networking sites should increase their privacy policies to better protect their members. These sites should invest more resources in determining which profiles contain false information, and prohibiting the existence of false profiles on their site. On way to accomplish this would be to require members to provide valid credit card information before their account is activated. Many of the social networking site members are under the age of 18 and do not likely have their own credit card yet. For children looking to create a profile, a parent’s credit card would have to be used to establish the account. Hopefully, this policy change would also encourage parents to monitor the Internet activity of their children.
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