TMI? Study Says Social Networking Users Need to be Safer, Smarter

When was the last time you checked your default privacy settings on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter? When was the last time you Googled yourself? Even seemingly benign information like birthdays, hometowns, and cell phone numbers can be abused by hackers and other evil-doers, according to this report on ChannelWeb, which cites a study from Webroot, an Internet security and software company.

“… users continually fail to properly apply privacy settings or restrict access. Security experts say the reasons for this dichotomy are multifaceted. ‘It’s dualistic. It’s a lack of information or knowledge for certain sites. When people go to these Web sites, they assume they’re going to be protected or they’re just not aware of the implications of posting things,’ said Jeff Horn, director of threat research for Webroot. ‘The uninformed user believes that they’re going to be protected by a large site.'”

So what’s the best way to do that? This article from from The Next Web explains how to check your Facebook settings, including photos, apps, and sharing. This article from the LinkedIn Learning Center explains how to control your privacy on that network. And, here is an article from Of Zen and Computing on how to set your Twitter stream to private. Of course, that sort of defeats most of what you might want to do on Twitter, but might not be a bad idea while you are getting started and trying to figure out what you want to say, and how you want to say it.

Related articles by Zemanta: