Think twice before you update your Facebook status.
The world’s most popular social networking site is not always the safest place to share information, said Janice Paulson, a member the student group Wilmington University Information Security Alliance.
Paulson and her colleagues recently made a presentation on the dangers of social media, focusing on Mark Zuckerberg’s burgeoning Internet program, to help Facebook users protect themselves from information theft.
“Once you put information out there, you can’t always take it back,” Paulson warned.
Even a year after a photo has been deleted from Facebook, for example, it still may exist somewhere in the Internet ether, whether it was reposted to a different site or shared through another social network, she said.
The biggest security-related mistake most Facebook users make is over-sharing information, she said.
Even sharing something as innocuous as the high school you graduated from could come back to bite you, said Ashley Jensen. High school names are commonly used as answers to security questions that allow access to online bank accounts, he said.
“You put two and two together and it gives you access to people’s accounts,” Paulson said.
Games and widgets are seeing increasing popularity on Facebook as well, Jensen said, but those programs are not always as safe as they seem. While the programs may be checked and vetted by Facebook officials before they are introduced, he said those applications aren’t necessarily rechecked later to see if any malicious software has been written into the programs.
“Other than being cute games, they can probe your computer for information,” he said.
Another growing social networking trend involves GPS-enabled cell phones, Paulson said, where people share their location with friends in their network. Facebook has also announced it is introducing a similar “places” feature.
If the proper safeguards aren’t in place on an account, anyone can see that location information, she said, making it easy for someone to break into an unoccupied house.
Protecting yourself means keeping up to date on Facebook’s privacy settings, which change so frequently they are difficult to keep up with, Jensen said.
“Anytime they add something new to Facebook, it adds two pages to the privacy agreement,” he said.
Check and update your privacy settings often to keep your information secure, he suggested. It’s also a good idea to vet people before making them friends, Paulson added, and she suggested grouping Facebook friends into different categories and only allowing some groups complete access to your profile.
A few simple steps and a little bit of common sense can make the world of Facebook a much safer place to be, she said.
