Social Networking Safety

Here are a few tips to keep yourself safe on social networking sites like Facebook and X:

• Treat links in social networking like you would treat links in email. Viruses and worms attempt to spread over social networks in a similar manner to viruses that spread via email, abusing your address books and friends lists.
• Don't allow social networks to scan your address books, some social networks use that information to build mailing lists and may inadvertently reveal the email addresses you have to spammers.
• Know what you've posted about yourself and where you work, scammers have been known to use information from social networking profiles to attempt to fool potential marks. Be careful about revealing too much online.
• Be careful about adding apps or extras to your profile, many of these apps again access to everything you've posted and can potentiality abuse that access.
• Be sure that the privacy settings on your profiles are set appropriately, and review them often, many social networking sites have their privacy settings change often and usually default to public
• Don't trust that things marked as 'private' or 'friends-only' will remain that way, if a photo or post would be embarrassing re-consider posting it at all.
• Be selective about who you accept as a friend, as that usually grants them full access to everything you've posted.