Social Networking
I originally joined facebook because I was concerned about the public availability of personal information. It is a bit disconcerting to see your name up there for everybody to see and find out personal information with just a few mouse clicks. How far does this information travel and who looks at it?A couple of weeks ago I decided to bite the bullet and see who uses facebook, and what information people were willing to put out about themselves. At this point in time I should explain that I am studying in information security and my intentions were to see how social networking sites such as facebook dealt with the mass of personal information stored about its users. Unfortunately my research was put to an halt when I started having a look around at a few of the profiles, people I know, people I used to know, and sadly people I had neglected to continue to know. People do tend to drift apart and communication wanes after a time I guess but it good to see what they are doing with themselves after all of these years.
But anyway back on topic.... ID thieves and spammers can have a field day on facebook, well actually they probably have been ever since it's release. When one considers what an ID fraudster requires to build character profile on a potential victim, for example your full name, date of birth, phone numbers, email addresses and photos. Everything they need or could ask for is right there in front of them in your profile. Add all of that together along with the fact that you can let people know what your physical movements are (travel, attending events, meeting places with friends etc.) and what you actually look like..... well I'll leave that up to your level of paranoia.
Fortunately facebook is particularly good when it comes to protecting private information but unfortunately it is up to the user to enable a few of the features and to be aware of what personal information they are posting. Common sense will hardly prevail here as you view your friends profiles and feel obliged to enter as much information about yourself as you can. What makes it harder is the fact that the friend search feature encourages you to search for old school friends, people from the same hometown as you and so on. Not that there should be anything wrong with revealing this information it's just there are people (scammers, spammers, ID thieves) searching through social network sites for easily obtainable information to harvest.
Stay safe and think about what information you choose to make public, if you wouldn't walk up to a stranger on the street and tell them something about yourself then don't post it on the internet.
…in this brave new world where tons of people are looking to mine our information and monetize whatever they can get their hands on, we stand to become nothing more than “contact information” rather than good business connections or friends.
