Safe Social Networking

Scams, traps, cons and swindles abound on the Internet. Here’s some tips to keep you socially safe online.

Social networking has come of age. If you’re not socially networking life may be passing you by –maybe! The fact is, millions are and sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Windows Live Spaces are services people can use to connect with others to share information like photos, videos, and personal messages.

With the rising incidence in popularity of these social sites, so do the risks of using them. Identity thieves, crims, hackers, spammers, virus writers along with other weird practitioners of arcane cyber wizardry follow the traffic on these sites with the intention of catching the unwary.

Avoid being fleeced, ripped-off and otherwise taken advantage of –read these tips.

1. Unsafe Clicking: Count ten before you click links that you receive in messages from your friends on your social Web site. Treat links in messages on these sites exactly the same as you would links in e-mail messages.
2. Practice Healthy Suspicion: Never trust that a message is really from who it says it's from. Hackers can and do break into accounts and send messages that look like they're from your friends, but aren't. A suspicious message is best treated as fraudulent and the use of an alternate method employed to contact your friend and check they did in fact, contact you. This most definitely includes invitations to join new social networks.  (I.e. SN sites new to the web. 
3. Protect your friends: Never allow social networking services to scan your e-mail address book. When you join a new social network, you typically receive offers to enter your e-mail address and password to find out whom else is on the network. They will likely offer to use this information to send e-mail messages to everyone in your contact list or even everyone you've ever sent an e-mail message to with that e-mail address. Many responsible social networking sites explain that they're going to do this, but some do not.
4. Lazy Clicking: Here’s a tip you should be already aware of. Type the address of your social networking site directly into the ‘Open’ command of I.E. or the address bar if you use Firefox, or use your personal bookmarks that you know you can trust. If you click a link to your site through e-mail or another Web site, you might be entering your account name and password into a fake site where your personal information could be stolen. Further, links in emails and on web pages can hide the real link and be masquerading as the legitimate link.  This is similar to what we call ‘phishing’ and I’m sure you’ve read the stories bout the ever growing incidence of phishing emails arriving in mail boxes.
5. Choose Your Friends Carefully: Be selective about who you accept as a friend on a social network. Identity thieves do create fake profiles in order to get information from you. This is known as social engineering and is more prevalent than many realise.
6. Haunt the House: Choose your social network carefully. Evaluate the site that you plan to use and make sure you understand the privacy policy. Find out if the site monitors content that people post. Read the information that is immediately available and do a Google search of the site. You never know what you might discover about it. Don’t immediately believe negative reports, but, the old adage, ‘no smoke without fire’ is worth remembering. After all, you will be providing personal information to this site, so, here’s a thought: use the same criteria that you would to select a site where you enter your credit card details!
7. Your Footprint On the Web Is Long Lasting: Did you know that what you write on a social networking site is long lasting and almost permanent? Even if you can delete your account, anyone on the Internet can easily print the information or save it to a computer.
8. Think Before You Act/Download: Installing extras on your site is chancy. Frequently social networking sites invite or make available software and third party apps for you to download that allow you to do more with your personal page. Cyber criminals may use some of these applications to steal your personal information –and more. Again, Google the app you’re interested in first and find out what others are saying about it. An excellent site for information on software in general is www.cnet.com. Check out their reviews and read the views of others besides the publishers themselves and/or the editors. Get a balanced picture and then make up your mind whether you want to add that app to your list of installed programmes on your computer.
9. Mixing Work & Socialising on the Net: Some employs accept/allow responsible extra curricula activity while you’re on their clock. Others don’t –for obvious reasons. If you value your weekly pay-check think about whether this is what you should do or not.
10. Parents: Kids Social Network a lot. Your children probably know far more about it than you! Talk to them about social networking. Be wise, maybe you can find out what they know and whether they are being safe online by asking for help and advice yourself! They may be keen to demonstrate their sites and show off their knowledge. Then you can adroitly (there’s a good word) suggest safety tips. Don’t, whatever you do, show shock or anger. All you will do is wreck any chance you have of monitoring their activities and fostering safe socialising on the net. That would not be smart.

There you have it.  Have fun, make friends, enjoy the web –and be safe while your at it.  John