Facebook has been taking strides to try and protect the privacy of its customers but it has a hard with so many people joining the social media site all the time. There are 500 million registered users and this number continues to grow, making it very difficult for facebook to do all that they can to protect their customers. Right now they have new privacy controls on Facebook, which allows them to provide their customers with additional protection. However with all the additional privacy, facebook users aren’t always going to be completely protected.
The advertisements on Facebook can be safe but there are some that can be very dangerous as they contain malware. It is very important that facebook users do all that they can to protect themselves from malicious attacks. This means you need to limit the amount of time you spend on facebook along with reducing the amount of information you are posting on Facebook. Playing the games on facebook can also be concerning since many of them need access to your Facebook account to download the plug-in and then it able to gather your personal information, leading to a lot of malware attacks and other concerns.
When you use facebook, what type of activities do you engage in? Are you posting personal information on the social media site like pictures of your kids along with information about where you live and if you are headed away on a vacation? While it helps you to find more of your friends by posting more personal information on the account, it can also leave you vulnerable to attacks on the social media site along with personal attacks at your home as some people will stalk you or will try to attack you.
Make sure you are setting your facebook privacy settings to the highest level possible in order to protect yourself. The settings need to be to “friends only” so that only they can get access to your account and make sure you are only adding people that you actually know or you can end up leaving your account vulnerable to a lot of people. Setting the account to the highest privacy is a great step and you can even block people from your account if they are individuals that are considered spammers or people that you do not know.
Adding a person to your spam list will make your profile invisible to them and it will be able to prevent this person from getting into your profile and getting your personal information. However you may end up putting yourself at risk by opening an email in facebook and clicking “reply to all” as this means all the people that got the message will be able to see your facebook account and can click on your name from the account, leaving you vulnerable to attacks.
Facebook does have a lot of rules pertaining to privacy but not all of the advertisers and users follow these rules. While facebook claims they will remove these accounts and so forth, there are still a lot of accounts that get hacked and a lot of personal information is still stolen. Here are some facebook safety tips to remember in order to keep your privacy safe:
- Never give out your user name and password to anyone
- Try not to post a lot of pictures, especially those of your children
- Do not include a lot personal information on the site and be very vague and basic with the information you do choose to put on there
- Never click on the ads in facebook as many of them contain malware
- Never give out your personal information on facebook
This isn’t an especially insightful article. Firstly, it describes Facebook’s users as its customers. We are no such thing. Facebook’s customers are its advertisers. We are merely the advertising audience. And the suggestion that Facebook is trying, in difficult circumstances, to do a lot to protect user’s privacy is utter nonsense. There is an obvious tension between the privacy rights of users and the needs of Facebook’s customers – it’s advertisers. So it’s pretty obvious who Facebook is going to favour.
This article would have been more useful if it highlighted how to go about setting privacy controls to “the highest level possible”. The privacy settings on Facebook are deliberately opaque. And how about a warning that when you make information visible to “Friends only”, that also means to any applications that they use on Facebook.
If anything, this article is dangerous. People who follow its shallow advice may be misled into thinking they have taken reasonable precautions. They have not.