Social Networking Safety

[tags]social networking, social, netowrking, community, forums, contact, profile, safety, facebook, myspace, 43things, bebo, communication, internet, population, united states, countries, lockergnome, chris pirillo, internetnut[/tags] 

Many would agree and many would disagree that social networking is a great idea. To be honest, I’m not a person that is very involved in social networking. I don’t have a MySpace, I don’t have a Bebo, I don’t have a Facebook and I don’t have a  43things. I don’t have anything to do with social networking really. I just write, as you read my blog right now, and I have an account on some forums I moderate that I am not going to disclose in this post.

Social Networking isn’t something that appeals to me. To get in contact with friends I use IM and E-mail. But one of the main reasons that I do not use social networking sites is because they give you the opportunity, and sometimes force you to type in and reveal some of your details or personal information that you don’t really want to reveal to the public. Okay, it’s possible to set your profile to private (on some sites) but I would not give out the URL to friends. I prefer to have my own blog, my own website and so on.

For instance, the person that you are talking to does not necessarily need to be who they say they are. You could be talking to someone who says they are a young sweet sixteen girl, but is really a 45 year old bloke living with his parents in their basement. They could be a pervert, they could be a sexual predator, they could be anybody or anything (a bot sent to retrieve information about people).

I would like to start off by talking about the sign up process on social networking sites. This page is quite straight forward, but can attract alot of detail about you.

For instance some sites ask you for your date of birth. Sometimes this is required so that they can verify that you are old enough to by using their site, but is easily faked. They don’t know if your 8, 18, 25, 45 or 105. All they know is that they are getting another person to join their huge amount of members. These sites get so huge, sometimes even 1,000 people doesn’t make much of a different to the numbers of visitors.

By signing up, you normally agree to follow the standards of the United States. Even though it may be illegal to get some details in one country, no matter where you are in the world, if it is an American company, you follow the American laws. If it’s a Swedish company, you follow the Swedish laws. If it’s a British company, you follow the British
laws. You get my idea.

This means you may be giving away some personal information you normally wouldn’t give away to be stored in a database, by somebody you don’t know.

It’s not just this, but the fact that many people do not read through the privacy policy or terms of service, so they do not know exactly what they are agreeing to.

Next time you sign up to a social network, please read everything, and keep safe.