Although Facebook’s technology was initially founded for Harvard students to stay connected on campus, it has become one of the most popular social networking sites worldwide. The site has made it easy for friends, grandparents, parents and their children to remain in the loop. This seems like a great advantage to have instantaneous relationships available at our fingertips, but what about online security?
Many may not understand the impact that “Facebooking” may have on their lives. For example, the website has game or survey applications that collect the individual user’s information and all of their friends’ information to create a unique online experience based on site preferences and application usage. While account and privacy settings can be adjusted accordingly, personal information can still be hacked.
To help avoid this problem from occurring, there are a few things that can be done to boost security. It’s important to remember that the least amount of information we provide the harder it becomes for malfeasant Internet creepers to slither their way into personal data. For this reason, it would be wise to avoid entering our birth year, (or put a fake birthday into the system) education and job information. If we don’t want others to know where we are, there’s no need to enter a status with location-specific information. Users should try to limit the number of times he or she may “like” an application or “tag” pictures since none of us know for certain where that information goes. Many can forget that workplace supervisors may be watching what we say and do online as well. So if we want in-depth communication, we can always send an email that’s completely separate from the social network’s platform.
Although nothing available via the Internet is guaranteed to be safe, we can still have fun when using Facebook. That said, it’s still important to use discretion to lessen the possibility of breached security and misuse of information.