Facebook (Again)

I once belonged to Facebook, about 4 months after it went on line. It wasn’t that popular at the time. Once it became popular and all these add-ons, gadgets, games and other intrusive crap hopped on board, (many created by hacks) and then the Beacon issue came about, I just ditched that site faster then a jack rabbit flees from a wolf. I sure in the heck didn’t want anything on the site that I personally didn’t put there and I sure as hell didn’t want the site following me around taking note of every site I visited or every place I shopped. To top it off I kept getting these damn messages from my buds asking me to join in on some crap like a farm or play a game or write on some wall or which am I a vampire or a wolf or some crap, and then I kept having to ignore everything cause it has no option to say no thanks. And then they started asking for money for stuff. The site just got too intrusive for me. Bad enough you have to join by which school you went to. (That’s how Facebook started, as a site for school kids) I remember the day I quit Facebook and some other idiot came up as me on all my buds sites. When I contacted Facebook about this error they had no clear answer as to what caused the error. (If you don’t know how the hell your site works what good is it to anyone) About a year later the site owner was sued cause he stole the idea from 2 other guys at his college and he had to pay out millions of dollars to them. I think a forum is more social then Facebook, even mIRC is more social. I wonder who was the first scraper to bring this crap site to the scrap world? So far I’ve received about 35 emails from scrappers wanting me to join Facebook but I will never go back to it.
Oh, it’s good to see you back again, Ellie. I don’t care how weird you think you are, you’ve always been cool in my book. Keep up the good work. And don’t forget to take it easy on yourself, at least once in a while anyway LOL
Huggins
Pat

i struggled with joining FB for a VERY LONG time. i finally made a page to encourage my little business. and i have a personal page too. but i still love blogging and i really think that i will never give that up.

For What Its Worth – I received this from a security professional:

FACEBOOK CONCERNS:
10 Security Reasons to Quit Facebook (And One Reason to Stay On)
You can’t go a day without logging in to see what your Facebook friends are up to? Consider these factors and you may decide being connected brings on too much risk. By Joan Goodchild, Senior Editor March 22, 2010 — CSO —
Last year, Baby Boomers quit Facebook at a faster pace than they joined.
That’s according to data published last year by the site Inside Facebook. After a huge growth in Facebook membership among the over-55 age group took place at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009, that same demographic began to defect in large numbers, just months after signing up.
Boomers were the the only shrinking age demographic on the site. What do Boomers know that others don’t? Boomers have discretion, according to Scott Wright, a security consultant based in Canada who also researches and writes about social media and security awareness on his site streetwise-security-zone.com.
While the numbers certainly continue to indicate that more people are joining Facebook than quitting, certain web sites that help people “kill” your online self have gained popularity, too. Facebook recently issued cease and desist orders to several of these sites, including one called Web 2.0 Suicide Machine.
Also see The 7 Deadly Sins of Social Networking

Why would someone decide to sign off Facebook forever? Here are ten observations from security and privacy pros about the risks of social media.

1. - Your privacy is history:
Wright took part in a panel discussion recently on the topic of privacy and said he was intrigued by the opinion of one academic who pointed out that the notion of privacy differs widely among generations.
“The 20-something view of privacy is basically that their parents not see what they are doing. That’s about it,” said Wright.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg apparently agrees. Zuckerberg made controversial remarks to a live audience earlier this year at an awards event and stated that openly sharing information with many people is today’s social norm. He went on to say “We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.” Many have translated this to mean Facebook doesn’t think its users want much privacy, and the policies of the site reflect that view.
Whether Zuckerberg is right or wrong depends on who you ask. And that leaves us to consider: As younger generations define privacy in new ways, it really good for us? Bethan Tuttle, an Washington-based independent consultant and privacy advocate, says no. Tuttle said she is concerned about some of the newer changes to Facebook that force users to share certain information because, in her words, without privacy, we don’t have civil liberties.
“If you can’t maintain privacy online and off, then you can’t speak freely,” said Tuttle. “These security issues need to be addressed in such a way that our privacy can be protected.”
Tuttle thinks the massive and quick growth Facebook has experienced in the last two years, coupled with a lack of privacy-centric leadership has left end user privacy as casualty. (Read more in Six Ways We Gave Up Our Privacy.)

2. - They don’t have your best interests in mind:
As Tom Eston, creator of the web site socialmediasecurity.com points out, the very business model Facebook, and other social networking sites like Twitter, stands on is making user information as public as possible in order to generate new ways to make money.
“They are really startups if you think about it. They don’t have a true business model,” said Eston. “Their philosophy is the more you share, the more information they have to make money with.”
With that in mind, can you really count on them to protect you? And do you know just how much information you are sharing that can be used not only by Facebook, but by the application developers that create those fun quizzes and games? Wright says most people don’t.
Case in point: A quiz designed by the ACLU that shows Facebook users just how much information they hand over to application developers every time they agree to install a new app. Want to take that quiz to find out who you were in a past life? Each time you do, almost everything on your profile, even if you use privacy settings to limit access, is made available to the creators of that application.

3. - Frequent redesigns affect privacy settings:
“Just when people figure out the privacy settings on Facebook, they go and change them again,” said Wright. “It always seems like it is being done in everyone’s best interest, but if you really examine it, they have never done anything other than to try and get people to share more information.”
The latest Facebook redesign in December now makes public, and searchable, certain user information that was previously private, such as which pages you are a fan of and your profile picture. And many of the features you can make private are left public unless you go in and adjust your privacy settings, which is no small task, according to Tuttle.
“I am really good online but it took me several tries to get my Facebook privacy settings where I needed them to be,” she said. “I think Facebook actually implemented some great changes with this redesign, but they need to make those easier and more stable. Privacy settings need to not be changed so many times in such a short period. People need to know weeks ahead of time exactly what to do and a method of not waking up one day and finding out all of their information has gone public.”

4. - Social engineering attacks are getting more targeted: I
f you are using Facebook, surely you have received messages by now on your wall asking “Have you seen this video?” or “Is this you in this photo?” If you click on the link, you run the risk of being infected by malware. These are known as social engineering attacks, and they are becoming more sophisticated said Wright. (Read more in 9 Dirty Tricks: Social Engineers’ Favorite Pickup Lines.)
“They are becoming very targeted. Even seasoned security professionals are falling for them,” he said.
The more information you share, coupled with a decrease in privacy, only means it is even easier for cyber criminals to get information about you that can be used to trick you into clicking on a bad link.
5. - You can’t trust the ads:
Even if you, unlike many users, know better than to click on a suspicious message or link in your Facebook account, what about the advertisements? While you may think the advertisements are harmless, unfortunately some contain malicious links. One common scenario involves a pop-up from the ad that claims your computer is infected and prompts you to download software to fix it. Instead of helpful software, you end up downloading something nasty instead. This is now commonly known in the security community as “scareware,” and it’s still a very effective way to snare unsuspecting users.

6. - Spam:
Blackberry owners using the mobile Facebook application have been experiencing increased amounts of spam lately that claims to be from Facebook, said Eston.
“I think it’s a security concern,” said Eston. “Mostly because spammers can use that vulnerability to make you think the message is coming from Facebook when it is not.
Many users simply wonder “Why is Facebook sending me this?” and instinctively open the message and log in to what turns out to be a fake screen that steals credentials.

7. - You don’t really know your friends:
A report from security firm Cloudmark that was released at the end of 2008 concluded that close to 40 percent of new Facebook profiles are actually fake. If you are one of those people with hundreds of “friends,” what are the chances you might have a fake friend or two out there in your network? Pretty high, said Wright.
Having lots of friends is dangerous is because it opens you up to additional security risks. Wright said those who get targeted for hacking are the ones who have lots of friends. The more friends you have, the more reach a criminal will have when he breaks into your profile and sends out a bad link to everyone.

8. - You can’t help yourself from being dumb:
The recent attention around the site pleaserobme.com has brought to light the safety concerns around social networking. Pleaserobme aggregates the Twitter feeds of people who play Foursquare, a location-sharing application that allows users to “check in” from their various geographic whereabouts. The problem is, in playing the game, many users are also publicly broadcasting that their home is likely unattended and a good “opportunity” (as the site terms it) for thieves.
As Tuttle puts it, you need to think about what you are doing and many people are not. Whether you’re updating your Facebook status or playing a location-sharing game through Twitter, you’re putting yourself out there in potentially dangerous ways, particularly if you don’t know all of your “friends” that well (See “You don’t really know your friends” above).
“If you are posting that you have arrived at a hotel at 11:00 at night and you are a female with a cute photo, you’re giving someone incentive to put on their shoes and go look for you. Are you even thinking about that?” she said.
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9. - The great unknown:
The layout and privacy settings keep changing. There is a lot of analysis and speculation about a potential Facebook IPO in the future and generally a lot of discussion of Facebook’s future business strategy. What does this mean for users? Wright said some fear it means an increase loss of privacy as the social networking site inevitably looks for ways to make money by offering up valuable user information to advertisers and developers. Will you stick around to see how the site evolves? Or will others take a cue from the Boomers and opt out?
“One of the things I find most interesting is that there are still many people who are scared to death of social networking sites,” said Wright. “These are usually the people who don’t see value in them. In the end, they may be the wisest of us all.”

10. - Ex’s, creeps and parents:
George Straight once sang, “All my ex’s live in Texas, that’s why I hang my hat in Tennessee.” There is little doubt that if Straight were break up with a girlfriend in today’s information age, he’d have to do more than simply move across state lines to avoid being found again. Facebook is making it possible for people who break up to be cyber stalked, even if they aren’t friends anymore, said Eston. Although the virtual connection is broken along with the actual relationship, having mutual friends makes it easier for your ex to keep tabs on you. The same goes for any creepy guy or girl you are trying to avoid.
Or you may get a friend request from a parent, which Wright claims many 20-something users he talks to considers the worst thing that could ever happen in the history of social networking.
“That is big driver for quitting,” he said. “Once the parent friends some of these people they immediately think ‘I’ve got to get out of this!’”

1. - Of course, if you’re the parent;
and you’re concerned about kids revealing too much on social networks, this is the promised reason you might want to STAY on Facebook—it might make your kids quit.

10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know
Posted by Nick O’Neill on February 2nd, 2009 11:00 AM
Everyday I receive an email from somebody about how their account was hacked, how a friend tagged them in the photo and they want a way to avoid it, as well as a number of other complications related to their privacy on Facebook. Over the weekend one individual contacted me to let me know that he would be removing me as a friend from Facebook because he was “going to make a shift with my Facebook use – going to just mostly family stuff.”
Perhaps he was tired of receiving my status updates or perhaps he didn’t want me to view photos from his personal life. Whatever the reason for ending our Facebook friendship, I figured that many people would benefit from a thorough overview on how to protect your privacy on Facebook. Below is a step by step process for protecting your privacy.

1. Use Your Friend Lists:
I can’t tell you how many people are not aware of their friend lists. For those not aware of what friend lists are, Facebook describes them as a feature which allows “you to create private groupings of friends based on your personal preferences. For example, you can create a Friend List for your friends that meet for weekly book club meetings. You can create Friend Lists for all of your organizational needs, allowing you to quickly view friends by type and send messages to your lists.”
There are a few very important things to remember about friend lists:
You can add each friend to more than one friend group
Friend groups should be used like “tags” as used elsewhere around the web
Friend Lists can have specific privacy policies applied to them
I’ll touch on each of the things listed above in more detail later. A typical setup for groups would be “Friends”, “Family”, and “Professional”. These three groups can then be used to apply different privacy policies. For example, you may want your friends to see photos from the party you were at last night, but you don’t want your family or professional contacts to see those photos.
Using friend lists is also extremely useful for organizing your friends if you have a lot of them. For instance I have about 20 friend lists and I categorize people by city (New York, San Francisco, D.C., Tel Aviv, etc), where I met them (conferences, past co-workers, through this blog), and my relationship with them (professional, family, social, etc).
You can configure your friend lists by visiting the friends area of your Facebook.

2. Remove Yourself From Facebook Search Results:
My mom is a teacher and one of the first things she asked me when she joined Facebook is how she could make sure her students couldn’t see that she was on the site. Understandably my mom doesn’t want her middle school students to know what she’s up to in her personal life. There are numerous reasons that individuals don’t want their information to show up in search results on Facebook, and it’s simple to turn off your public visibility.
How to Remove Yourself From Facebook Search Results
Now that you’ve decided that you would like to remove yourself from Facebook’s search results, here’s how to do it:
Visit your search privacy settings page
Under “Search Visibility” select “Only Friends” (Remember, doing so will remove you from Facebook search results, so make sure you want to be removed totally. Otherwise, you can select another group, such as “My Networks and Friends” which I believe is the default.)
Click “Save Changes”
By default, Facebook makes your presence visible to the network you are in. Frequently, people aren’t aware of their visibility, so this is one of the first settings that users wish to modify. By selecting “Customize” from the search visibility drop down you can make your settings even more granular.

3. Remove Yourself From Google:
Facebook gets A TON of traffic from displaying user profiles in search engines. Not all of your profile is displayed though. Currently the information displayed in the search profile is limited to: your profile picture, a list of your friends, a link to add you as a friend, a link to send you a message, and a list of up to approximately 20 fan pages that you are a member of.
For some people, being displayed in the search engines is a great way to let people get in contact with you, especially if you don’t have an existing website. Facebook also tends to rank high in the search results, so if you want to be easy to find, making your search profile can be a great idea. Many people don’t want any of their information to be public though.
By visiting the same search privacy settings page listed in the previous step, you can control the visibility of your public search listing which is visible to Google and other search engines. You can turn off your public search listing by simply un-checking the box next to the phrase “Create a public search listing for me and submit it for search engine indexing” as pictured in the image below.

4. Avoid the Infamous Photo/Video Tag Mistake:
This is the classic Facebook problem. You let loose for a few hours one night (or day) and photos (or videos) of the moment are suddenly posted for all to view, not just your close friends who shared the moment with you. The result can be devastating. Some have been fired from work after incriminating photos/videos were posted for the boss to see. For others, randomly tagged photos/videos have ended relationships.
At the least, a tagged photo/video can result in personal embarrassment. So how do you prevent the infamous tagged photo or video from showing up in all of your friends news feeds? It’s pretty simple. First visit your profile privacy page and modify the setting next to “Photos Tagged of You”. Select the option which says “Customize…” and a box like the one pictured below will pop up.
Select the option “Only Me” and then “None of My Networks” if you would like to keep all tagged photos private. If you’d like to make tagged photos visible to certain users you can choose to add them in the box under the “Some Friends” option. In the box that displays after you select “Some Friends” you can type either individual friends or friend lists.

5. Protect Your Albums:
Just because you’ve uploaded photos doesn’t mean that you’ve accurately tagged every photo correctly. This setting is more of a reminder than anything else. Frequently people will turn of their tagged photo visibility to certain friend lists yet keep their photo albums public to the world. If you are trying to make all your photos invisible you must do so on an album by album basis.
There is a specific Photos Privacy page from which you can manually configure the visibility of each album (as pictured below). This is an extremely useful configuration option and I highly recommend that you take advantage of it. This way you can store your photos indefinitely on Facebook yet ensure that the only people that can view your photos are the ones who you really want to see them.

6. Prevent Stories From Showing Up in Your Friends’ News Feeds:
Oh, did you really just break up with your girlfriend? I’m sorry to hear that. I’m sure all of your friends and business contacts are also sorry to hear that. I can’t tell you how many awkward relationship status changes I’ve seen. The most regular one I’ve seen recently is when an attractive female ends their relationship and numerous guys hop on the opportunity to console her.
I’ve also seen the end of marriages, as well as weekly relationship status changes as individuals try to determine where their relationship stands with their significant other. My personal policy is to not display a relationship status, but many like to make a public statement out of their relationship. For those individuals, it can be a smart move to hedge against future disasters.
There are a number of ways to control how your relationship status is displayed. The first thing that most people should do is uncheck the box next to “Remove Relationship Status” in the News Feed and Wall Privacy page. In the rare instance that a relationship does uncomfortably end, you can avoid making things more uncomfortable by avoiding a friend notification about it.
Second, your relationship status falls within your “Basic Information” section of your profile. You can control who can see your basic information next to the “Basic Information” setting on the Profile Privacy page. Keep in mind that other relevant profile information like your gender, birth date, networks, and other settings are visible within your basic information section.
Making your basic information completely invisible to friends probably isn’t a good idea, but removing the news feed stories about relationship changes most likely is.

7. Protect Against Published Application Stories:
This one is a little more tricky to manage but I’ll explain the issue at hand. Frequently when you add an application, a news feed item is immediately published to your profile. One way to get instantly embarrassed is to visit the “Have Sex!” application (found here). This application has no purpose besides telling your friends that you are interested in having sex with them. Without taking any action, the application will post a news feed story to your profile which says the equivalent of “Nick just published to the world that he is having sex!”
This is surely something that none of your professional contacts if any of your contacts are interested in seeing (honestly I’m a bit confused about that application, but that’s a different story). That’s why it’s important to monitor what takes place after you install an application on Facebook. Once you install an application you should visit your profile to ensure that no embarrassing notification has been posted to your profile.
More often then not, nothing will be posted but there are many applications on the platform unfortunately that publish stories without you knowing it. There are two ways to avoid having this happen: don’t visit applications or scan your profile every time that you do. Ultimately you shouldn’t be concerned about applications that you’ve built a trusted relationship with but any new applications could potentially post embarrassing notifications.

8. Make Your Contact Information Private:
I personally use Facebook for professional and personal use and it can frequently become overwhelming. That’s why I’ve taken the time to outline these ten privacy protection steps. One of the first things I did when I started approving friend requests from people that I hadn’t built a strong relationship with, was make my contact information visible only to close contacts.
The contact information is my personal email and phone number. It’s a simple thing to set but many people forget to do it. Frequently people we don’t know end up contacting us and we have no idea how they got our contact information. Your contact privacy can be edited right from your profile. If you have chosen to enter this information, you should see a “Contact Information” area under the “Info” tab in your profile.
If it displays, you simply click “Edit” and then a screen like the one pictured below will show up.
For each contact item that you have in your profile you should set custom privacy settings (as pictured below) so that contacts that you aren’t close to don’t have access to your phone number and/or email. It’s a small change but it can save you the hassle of being pestered by people you don’t know well. Also, protecting your privacy is generally a good practice to get in the habit of doing.
As a side note, this is a great area to take advantage of friend lists. By getting in the habit of grouping your friends, you can ensure that you are navigating Facebook safely through privacy settings that are attached to your friend lists.

9. Avoid Embarrassing Wall Posts:
Just because you use Facebook for business doesn’t mean your friends do. That’s why once in a while a friend of yours will come post something embarrassing or not necessarily “work friendly” and it can end up having adverse effects. That’s why Facebook has provided you with the ability to customize your wall postings visibility. You can also control which friends can post on your wall. There are two places you can control these things. Adjust Wall Posting Visibility
Within your profile page you can control who can view wall postings made by your friends. To do so, click on the “Settings” icon on the wall in your profile page. Next, find the box pictured in the image above and adjust the setting which says “Who can see posts made by friends?” I’d suggest using a strategy similar to the one outlined in the previous step regarding contact information.
Control Who Can Post to Your Wall
In addition to controlling who can view wall postings published by your friends, you also want to control which friends can post on your wall. Not everybody needs to do this, but occasionally you simply want to prevent some people from posting on your page. If you visit the Profile Privacy settings page, there is a section labeled “Wall Posts”.
From this area you can completely disable your friends’ ability to post on your wall. You can also select specific friend lists that can post on your wall. Personally, I don’t really care who can post on my wall but I can understand the need to control who can see those wall postings. If you want to limit who can post wall posts on your profile, this is where you can do it.

10. Keep Your Friendships Private:
While it’s fun to show off that you have hundreds or thousands of friends on Facebook, some of your friends don’t want to live public lives. That’s why it’s often a good policy to turn off your friends’ visibility to others. I’ve had a number of individuals visit my profile and then selectively pick off friends that are relevant to them for marketing purposes, or other reasons.
Whatever the reason they are doing it, just know that they are … it’s part of what makes Facebook so addictive: the voyeuristic nature. Also, your friends are frequently visible to the public through search engines and exposing this information can ultimately present a security risk. To modify the visibility of your friends, visit the Profile Privacy page.
Navigate down to the setting which says “Friends” and then modify the setting to whatever is right for you.

Conclusion:
These are just ten ways that you can protect your privacy on Facebook. While there are a few other small things to keep in mind, these ten settings are most important. Keep in mind that while you may have turned off the visibility of many profile sections, there is no way to prevent all photos or videos from being visible if friends of yours make the images visible.
The best way to prevent embarrassing items from showing up on Facebook in the future is to not make bad judgments in your personal life. We’re all human though and being completely paranoid about every choice you make is probably not the best way to live your life. Be aware of what privacy settings are available and be conscious of what your friends may be publishing about you.
While you may not want to configure all of the privacy settings outlined, simply knowing how to do so is a great step in the right direction. By following the 10 settings listed above you are well on your way to an embarrassment free future on Facebook!
Seven Deadly Sins of Social Networking Security:
To users of LinkedIn, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter or all of the above: Are you guilty of one of these security oversights? By Bill Brenner, Senior Editor June 30, 2009 — CSO —
Admit it: You are currently addicted to social networking. Your drug of choice might be Facebook or Twitter, or maybe Myspace or LinkedIn. Some of you are using all of the above, and using them hard, even IT security practitioners who know better.
While it’s impossible to escape every social networking threat out there, there are steps one can take to significantly reduce the risks. CSOonline recently checked in with dozens of IT security professionals (ironically, using more than one social networking platform to do so) to pinpoint seven typical security mistakes people make; and how to avoid them.

1. - Over-sharing company activities:
This is a sin of pride, when someone gets excited about something their company is working on and simply must tell everyone about it. Maybe you work for a drug company that is on the verge of developing the cure for cancer. Maybe the company is developing a new car that runs on curbside trash — in other words, something everyone will want. (See also: Intellectual Property Security: Don’t Lose Your Head)
By sharing too much about your employer’s intellectual property, you threaten to put it out of business by tipping off a competitor who could then find a way to duplicate the effort or find a way to spoil what they can’t have by hiring a hacker to penetrate the network or by sneaking a spy into the building.
Then there are hackers controlling legions of botnets that could be programmed to scour a company’s defenses and, upon finding a weakness, exploit it to access data on the intellectual property. With the data in hand, the hacker can then sell what they have to the highest bidder, which just might be your biggest competitor.
“Sharing this kind of information could lead to targeted attacks on specific technology-producing enterprises,” says Souheil Mouhammad, a senior security expert at Altran Technologies.
This sin has sparked a debate in the security industry about whether companies need to revise their employee computer use policies with more specific language on what is/isn’t allowed in the social networking arena (see also: Debate: Does Social Networking Require User Policy Changes?).
To reign in the urge to share too much, it might be useful to repeat this saying, which has started to appear in the public domain: “Loose Tweets Sink Fleets.”

2. - Mixing personal with professional :
This sin is closely related to the first, but extends beyond the mere disclosure of company data. This is the case where someone uses a social network for both business and pleasure, most commonly on Facebook, where one’s friends include business associates, family members and friends (see also: Slapped in the Facebook: Social Networking Dangers Exposed).
The problem is that the language and images one shares with friends and family may be entirely inappropriate on the professional side. A prospective employer may choose to skip to the next candidate after seeing pictures of you drunk or showing off a little too much leg at someone’s birthday party. In sharing such things, you also stand a good chance of making the company you represent look bad.
“In my view one of the major rules when engaging in social networking is to be aware that your words belong in the public domain,” says Paul V. de Souza, chief security engineer at AT&T. “You may be quoted all over the Internet, so make sure to choose your words carefully. Be diplomatic and extremely professional.”
In some cases, it’s nearly impossible to separate business from the personal on a social networking site. Those who work for media companies, for example, are sometimes required to use all their social networking portals to proliferate content in an effort to boost page views which, in turn, attract potential advertisers. But wherever and whenever possible, security practitioners work to keep each locked in their respective boxes.
“You have to understand very clearly what the objective of your presence on any given social network is. If it is for work, keep it for work only. If it is for personal/fun use, keep it for personal use only,” says Benjamin Fellows, a senior IT security and risk consultant at Ernst & Young. “I can’t tell you how many times I have been invited to Facebook by a work colleague only to find things on their wall or profile that are definitely not politically correct or are downright offensive. I keep all my work friends in LinkedIn and my personal friends in Facebook. Even then, I am very careful what I say on either site. I guess you could also put this under the heading of know your audience.”

3. - For the person who has just been laid off;
or had their professional integrity called into question online, the urge to fire back with a stream of vitriol can be irresistible. Call this a sin of wrath.
“You don’t want to get into a flame war,” says John Bruggeman, a Cincinnati-based IT director. “Be mindful of what you say and imagine you are at a party where everyone is listening, including your boss, spouse or future employer.”
Scott Hayes, president and CEO of Database-Brothers Inc., agrees, saying, “Posting any content when angry is about as dangerous as sending flaming emails, if not more so. Think twice about clicking ‘submit’ because the world may be looking at your angry, immature rant for years.”

4. - Believing he/she who dies with the most connections wins:
For some social networkers, it’s all about accumulating as many connections as possible. Folks on LinkedIn are notorious for doing this, especially those in such LinkedIn groups as TopLinked and LION. This may seem harmless enough or, at the worst, just annoying. But when the name of the game is quantity over quality, it’s easy to link or “friend” a scam artist, terrorist or identity thief.
“Always verify the person who wants to get in contact with you,” says Ruud van den Bercken, a security specialist at XS4ALL Internet in the Netherlands. “Do you know him or her? If not, why is the person trying to connect with you? Check if the profile of the other person is secured. If you can’t retrieve a list of that person’s connections, you have to ask yourself” if you really want to go down that road.
As San Francisco-based network and security architect/engineer Jatinder Thukral puts it: “I’d rather have 50 relevant contacts than 500 unknowns.”

5. - Password sloth:
Another common sin is one of laziness, in this case picking passwords for your social networks that you’re least likely to forget. In many cases, that means using the same password for LinkedIn and Facebook that you’re using for your online bank account or work machine. If someone with malicious intent figures out the password for one social network, that person can now go and access everything else.
“Using the same password on several sites is like trusting the weakest link in a chain to carry the same weight. Every site has vulnerabilities, plan for them to be exploited,” says Daniel Philpott, information security engineer at OnPoint Consulting Inc.

6. - Facebook in particular is notorious;
as a place where inboxes are stuffed with everything from drink requests to cause requests. For some social networkers, clicking on such requests is as natural as breathing. Unfortunately, the bad guys know this and will send you links that appear to be from legitimate friends. Open the link and you’re inviting a piece of malware to infect your machine. Christophe Veltsos, president of Prudent Security, describes this as being “click-happy” and warns, “Don’t click unless you’re ready to deal with drive-by downloads and zero-day attacks.”

7. - Endangering yourself and others:
All of the above tie into the seventh and perhaps most serious sin, which is that reckless social networking can literally put someone’s life in danger. It could be a relative or co-worker. Or it could be yourself.
Security experts advise extreme caution when posting birthday information, too much detail on your spouse and children, etc. Otherwise, they could become the target of an identity thief or even a kidnapper.
At the CSO Executive Seminar on Data Loss Prevention in Chicago, last month, Motorola CSO Bill Boni expressed his reservations about using Twitter, calling it a great way to get one’s self kidnapped. “Don’t be a twit,” Boni said to those who might feel the need to divulge every detail about their location and what they’re doing (see also: The Final 5 Tweets of Harold Wigginbottom, Tech-Savvy CEO).