Social Networking
What is social networking?
Social networking is a way of keeping in touch with friends and family, sharing pictures, ideas, latest news and more. Sites such as MySpace and Facebook are popular social networking websites and currently have tens of millions of users.
Safe Social networking
Many social networking sites provide privacy settings which enable users to restrict access to the information they post in their profiles.
Users can determine whether they want information to be public—accessible to all or private—accessible only to selected friends. If a social networking site doesn’t offer this sort of privacy control and can be viewed by anyone, it’s advisable not to post personal information on the site.
Privacy and security are real issues for internet users and social networking sites frequently change and update their policies to address this. Checking security settings is important to see if options have changed.
Some social networking sites, such as LinkedIn, are used more for business connections than purely social contact. Although these sites are aimed at helping individuals promote themselves, users need to be careful about posting too much details in their work history as it can provide details to criminals and hackers who use them to help build a profile of the user—and subsequently steal their identity. This issue is covered in detail in the Common cybersafety issue: Protecting personal information.
Users need to be careful who they accept as a ’friend’ on any social networking site. Some people impersonate others or create whole new identities for themselves, either for fun or with malicious intent. Some of these frauds are obvious while other imposters are well disguised. Criminals may also obtain information from other sources, such as stolen mobile phones, enabling them to imitate real friends. They can then use access a social networking profile to gain more information and steal that user’s identity.
When somebody asks to be a friend on Facebook, users can check their identity by asking them to answer a question that only the real friend would know.
Users are advised to generally aim to keep private information private. This is especially important for users who have a large network of friends that they don’t know in the real world.
Children and young people are particularly tempted to build huge lists of friends and are less guarded about their privacy.