Facebook and Privacy

Today, I’m going to tell you all about Facebook security and why you should keep it private. I will not talk about facebook, but if you would like to find something about it, like who created and what it is, you can go and visit Wikipedia’s page on it here.

I have facebook, and I decided to see if I could be found on the web through facebook. When I searched there were to pieces of information of me. One was of my profile and a display of all my friends, and the other was my profile picture on facebook. I realised that I’ve not only exposed my own information but all my contacts’ as well, so I immediately changed my privacy settings. However it was too late to stop my picture and I still have it on the internet that will haunt me forever.

However this isn’t the end. At the time, I didn’t realise this but if I add just one application, all applications on facebook get access to my details. It is too late for me, but I advise any facebook users to think twice, or even thrice before adding an app.

There is also the issue of people who tag you in photos. There might have been a time, when you carelessly got drunk and messed around, and your friend took some photos of you doing god knows what. Now it’s years later, and you look at your profile and you find you’ve been tagged in these photos. The problem is that everyone has access to viewing these photos, sometimes even regardless whether they are your friend. Business managers who sneakily spy on people who are signing up for a job can check on facebook, see these photos and immediately make you an unsuitable candidate for the job.

It is important that you change your privacy settings on facebook, or you may be very surprised. Try typing your name in Google and see what comes up. There are many privacy settings, all of which you may not want to apply, but before you ignore them once again, have a think about the consequences of your actions.

Online Identites

This week I’m going to talk to you about online identity and the positive and negative aspects of it, as well as how people can get hold of it.

Every time you sign up for an account on Facebook, or Bebo, or most other sites, you generally have to give personal details such as your full name, your date of birth and where you live. Using this, the site can make you an online identity. There are both positive and negative aspects of this.

Let’s start with the positives. If you are looking to be reunited with an old friend that you bumped into yesterday on facebook, typing in their name in the search box lets facebook scan through all the profiles and comes up with a list of people who share the same name. Also Facebook uses your network to search for people, since you are most likely to know them. And so this limits the number of people that show up in the list. This is very useful. Also, banks can use your online identity to check whether it really is you who is withdrawing money. For example, the bank may require that you answer a specific question out of a number, and you have to answer it. Choosing this question makes it even more difficult for hackers. However hackers are still able to hack in to your accounts. And this is where the negatives start.

Hackers are able to hack into your account in a number of ways. For example, they can use decoders, which decode your password (picture on the right).There is also a bug which notes down every single key you press on your keyboard. Banks soon found out about this, so they started recommending to their customers that if they want to sing into their account, they should click or drag and drop the numbers. Then hacker found out about this, and they have now invented a bug that takes a snapshot of your screen every time you click. A really obvious and most common way of obtaining someone’s password is by looking over their shoulder. This proves how easy it is for people to get hold of your online identity, so do anything to protect it!

Overall, I believe that online identity can be useful, but people must be very careful not to abuse it. For example, people shouldn’t sign up for accounts they haven’t heard of, or make sure that nobody is spying on you whenever you use your password.