I forgot to mention in class that Facebook recently improved their privacy options, making it much easier to limit who gets to see your information. Well, apparently they didn't quite work out all of the kinks before implementing it. A guy in Canada tested the new settings to see if they worked; he was able to pull up private pictures of Paris Hilton, among other people. The Associated Press confirmed the "privacy glitch" by finding a personal photo posted by Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook! It's pretty scary when even he can't keep his profile completely private.
The remainder of the article focuses on the security (or lack thereof) of social networking sites in general. I think we’ve all gotten “messages” or “comments” from our Myspace friends telling us “OMG have you seen this video click here!”, followed soon after by “Sorry guys I got spammed! Don’t click that link!” I actually got one the other day from a friend on Facebook, so unfortunately the spammers have invaded. Now, I’m not 100% sure about this, but I don’t think that spammers just somehow crack your password to get into your account. I think you have to be gullible enough to click on one of those links. Once again, the problem comes down to education. We need to teach people how to know which links are safe to click on, and which ones scream “VIRUS!”
(I’ll talk about this article more in my podcast, especially the last couple paragraphs which deal with legislating social networks.)
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I just read an article today in the Journal and Courier about parents joining Facebook to make sure their kids are "behaving." The article contained a sidebar which stated that users could set their photographs and blogs to private (meaning parents could not get access). I thought this screamed more "red alert" than the actual photograph or blog might. I know that if I was trying to look at a photo album of someone and it read "blocked or private" I would raise a curious eyebrow as to what those photographs were of! I am just imagining a parent freaking out by the words "private". The child would better of eliminating the photographs or blogs altogether than having a "private access" attached to it which would draw more unwanted attention.
The spammers are getting so sophisticated that it's hard to stay ahead of them. I err on the side of deleting too much, perhaps, but it saves me a lot of headache.
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