Posts tagged "Online/Social Media Privacy"

Six Ways Your Facebook Privacy Is Being Compromised: How to Protect Yourself

One billion people worldwide use Facebook to share the details of their lives with their friends and may be unaware their Facebook Privacy could be compromised. Trouble is, they also might be unintentionally divulging matters they consider private to co-workers, clients and employers. Worse yet, they may be sharing their privacy with marketing companies and even scammers, competitors and identity thieves.

Here are six ways Facebook could be compromising your private information and how to protect yourself:

facebook timeline1.  The new Timeline format brings old lapses in judgment back to light. Timeline, introduced in late 2011, makes it easy for people to search back through your old Facebook posts, something that was very difficult to do in the past. That could expose private matters and embarrassing photos that you’ve long since forgotten posting.

Posted in Digital Reputation & Trust, Online Privacy, Social Media Privacy by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
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Google and Facebook Go Deeper Into Your Privacy

This post is a summary of an excellent article appearing in USA Today By Byron Acohido, Scott Martin and Jon Swartz.

It’s a heated competition to tap what many experts predict will be the next big Internet gold rush — online advertising — Google and Facebook laid down very big bets, during a week when European regulators are hashing out strict new rules that could prevent much of what the tech giants seek to do.

Google signaled its intent to begin correlating data about its users’ activities across all of its most popular services and across multiple devices. The goal: to deliver those richer behavior profiles to advertisers.

Likewise, Facebook announced it will soon make Timeline the new, more glitzy user interface for its service, mandatory. Timeline is designed to chronologically assemble, automatically display and make globally accessible the preferences, acquaintances and activities for most of Facebook’s 800 million members.

Posted in Identity Theft Prevention, Online Privacy by John Sileo, Identity Theft Speaker.
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Avoiding Social Spam Hackers on Facebook and Twitter

The post appears like it’s coming from a known friend. It’s enticing (“check out what our old high school friend does for a living now!”), feeds on your curiosity and good nature, begs you to click. A quick peek at the video, a chance to win a FREE iPad or to download a coupon, and presto, you’ve just infected your computer with malware (all the bad stuff that sends your private information to criminals and marketers). Sound like the spam email of days gone by? You’re right – spam has officially moved into the world of social media, and it’s like winning the lottery for cyber thugs.

What is Social Spam?

Nothing more than junk posts on your social media sites luring you to click on links that download malicious software onto your computer or mobile device.

Posted in Cyber Data Security, Identity Theft Prevention, Online Privacy by John Sileo, Identity Theft Speaker.
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7 Steps to Stem Facebook Privacy Bleeding

Why You Should Share Facebook Privacy Settings with Friends

A true friend does more than just post updates about their conquests on your wall. They share information with you that makes your life better, even if it isn’t exactly what you want to hear. And you do the same for them. But are your friends unwittingly sharing too much information about you with others (strangers, advertisers, app developers, scammers)? Probably. For example, if they (or you) haven’t customized your privacy settings lately, you are giving Facebook permission to:

  • Publish your name, photo, birth date, hometown and friend list to everyone?
  • Indirectly share your restricted data with outsiders through your friends?
  • Let your friends check you in to embarrassing locations where you aren’t?
  • Post your Likes as advertisements on friends’ walls using your name?
  • Authorize Google to index, access and share your information on the web?

Posted in Cyber Data Security, Fraud Detection & Prevention, Identity Theft Prevention, Online Privacy by John Sileo, Identity Theft Speaker.
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Facebook Apps Leaking Your Information

A report was recently published claiming that nearly 100,000 Facebook apps have been leaking  access codes belonging to millions of users’ profiles. Symantec released the report and said that an app security flaw may have given apps and other third parties access to users’  profiles. Facebook maintains that they have no evidence of this occurring.

In their report, Symantec wrote:

We estimate that as of April 2011, close to 100,000 applications were enabling this leakage. We estimate that over the years, hundreds of thousands of applications may have inadvertently leaked millions of access tokens to third parties.

These “access tokens” help apps interact with your profile.They are most often used to post updates from the application to your wall. When you add the applications to your profile you, as the Facebook user, is giving the apps access to your information by accepting their conditions.  According to the investigation, these tokens were included in URLs sent to the application host and were then sent to advertisers and analytics platforms. If the recipient recognized the codes (meaning they have to be qualified to read and write HTML code), they could gain access to the user’s wall’s and profile.

Posted in Online Privacy by John Sileo, Identity Theft Speaker.
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