facebook security

Now that facebook has opened parts of profiles to be indexed by the search engines, there have been many concerns about privacy of user information.  Now your name and some other (basic) details will be searchable by google.  Shall we say that again?  Lets say someone has a grudge and google's your name and they find you have a profile on facebook, linkedin and other social networking sites.  Now they know which sites you belong to, they can easily begin their attack.  

thisismoney.co.uk has a good article about this today .  They quote a BBC1 consumer watchdog experiment which is quite interesting.   They created a fictional facebook user and then contacted 100 random people to invite them to be their 'facebook friend'.   The result?  35 people accepted.  THIRTY FIVE PEOPLE ACCEPTED TO BE FRIENDS WITH A TOTAL STRANGER.  What happens next?  Obviously, they now have access to the full profiles of 35 people.  Names, hometown, birthdays, friends, family, likes dislikes, relationship status etc etc.  Can you see where this is going?  Well, they continued the experiment a little further and picked out one guy and applied for an online bank account and even got accepted for credit cards in one of their new 'friend's name'.  

An Internet security expert called Tom Ilube helped out with this experiment and says "It used to take two to three weeks to get enough information to steal an identity. Now it takes two to three hours"

This can, and does happen on all social networking sites, not only facebook.

You obviously can start to protect yourself by not accepting friendships from strangers and limiting the information that you put in your profile.  You can also fine tune the security and privacy settings in facebook so critical info isn't revealed.   

Let this be a lesson to us all - SAFEGUARD YOUR PERSONAL DATA on all websites, period.  It may not stop every case but we can prevent the majority of these identity thefts.

The consumer watchdog episode will be airing on BBC1 tonight at 8pm GMT.