The Perils of Facebook

Recently my friend Aden went on a Facebook hiatus. After concerns over the privacy of his information, he removed himself from the site. This brings up some points I want to make. If you have any public service announcement music now is the time to cue it up.

I will start with a couple of lists. These are based on my experience and what I have seen other people do.

Great Things:

• Keeping track of what people are up to, what school they attend, what year they are, or where they work.
• Seeing pictures of trips my friends take and places they go.
• Knowing when people's birthdays are and dropping them a wall post.
• Getting friends' phone numbers when a phone needs to be reprogrammed.
• Finding out if a girl really has a boyfriend or just made one up when a guy was hitting on her.

Terrible Things:

• Wasting time by looking at the news feed and refreshing it over and over.
• Resentment over not being invited to events that are talked about on Facebook or not being among someone's top friends.
• Letting Facebook stalking substitute for actual interaction.
• Facilitating false assumptions about other people and inviting unequal comparisons. Fr. Charlie once said, "Don't compare someone else's outside to your inside." Facebook bombards users with the facades other people put up.

Third Party Applications
I have a strong no third party applications stance. Since I already have concerns over how Facebook will use my information, I do not want to multiply the problem by allowing a half dozen different programs each with their own privacy standards and security vulnerabilities to access my profile.

For example, my Dad uses the Family Link application. I will not confirm I am his son because that would require I allow an application access to my profile. Anyone who is friends with my Dad and I know we are related. No one who is a friend of mine needs to know my Dad's name, my Mom's name, who my brother is, who my cousins are, who their parents are, etc. Anyone who meets them will lean their names as they meet them.

Real Dangers
On many profiles people can get answers to questions like:

In what city were you born?
What is your mother's maiden name?
What is your birthday?
What was your high school mascot?
Who was your first employer?

These are common security questions. Banks ask these questions to reset your password before giving you access to real money. Email accounts can easily be compromised and thieves can spam everyone in your address book.

This information can easily be gleaned from a person's profile. While I trust my 449 friends will not try to steal my identity, I do not trust they are all sophisticated enough to avoid leaving their password on a public computer, phishing, installing questionable third party applications, or linking their profile to a myriad of websites. At least half a dozen of my friends have had their accounts hacked into. There could have been a score more whose accounts were frozen after Facebook realized their friends were being sent spam in alphabetical order.

As an aside, you need to be aware of one of the scams making the rounds. Crooks will break into email or Facebook accounts, pose as the account holder, and send messages asking for money. They will claim some dire situation like "I am in the middle of Europe and lost my wallet and phone! Please send money to this bank account ASAP!" If you get a frantic message asking for money investigate it first. If you have the person's phone number, call it, especially if the message claims the phone is lost or does not work. If you know other friends of the person, contact them. Ask if your mutual friend is in Europe or whatever situation the message claims.

Think about the situation. If you were in the dire situation described with no money and no one to help you would you really get access to a computer, contact a person other than your immediate family or best friends, and have your bank account number memorized?

Advertising you are going on vacation will also let people know your residence will be unoccupied and ripe for robbery. This is a big problem if you list your address on your profile.

What you can do
The first and most important thing you can do to keep your information private is do not put it on Facebook. If it is not online, no one can steal it online.

The second thing is to control access to what you do place online. Under Account in the top right corner, click Privacy Settings. Here you can control many settings, all of which deserve review. I set many things to Friends Only. At Applications and Websites on the bottom left, you can follow a link and block all platform applications, games and websites.

There are many wonderful things you can do online, but you need to be aware of the dangers and proactive in protecting yourself.

To bring this back to the beginning, Aden ended his hiatus and came back to Facebook.