Throughout our lives we have had documents that describe some aspect of our life. They are usually official records. We have school report cards, University transcripts and as we begin to work we have our resumes or CVs. Additionally, banks and other financial institutions maintain credit information. Libraries track what books we have read and if you are a frequent shopper with a bonus card at your local grocery your shopping habits are recorded. Profiles of who you are and how you live your life are created seamlessly by many institutions without you even thinking about it.
There is a another record of who you are being created every day. It may seem innocuous and innocent but if not monitored it could become a record you wish you had controlled better. It is your information, shouldn’t you control it and manage its risk?
The information I am talking about is the information that is stored in on-line social networking sites like FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn and Hyves. Sure you determine what is in your profile, but are you determining who is seeing that profile? Are you aware that the social networking account you started as a casual means to find old friends and share jokes and stories with others has become a repository of information about yourself?
Recently I signed up for a new financial services account and they wanted to increase security by asking me a few questions. In the past the question was always “What is your mother’s maiden name?” But apparently, that is not good enough anymore. Now I routinely see questions like:
- What is your favorite sports team?
- What was your first automobile make and model?
- What High School did you go to?
- What was the name of your favorite pet?
- What is your favorite food?
On most FaceBook profile pages you can get all of these answers. Many people join the fan pages of their favorite teams. Some even join fan pages of the first car or have posted pictures of their first car on line. The name of your high school is very easy as many join alumni pages. Again, many have pictures of their favorite pets. As for favorite food, for an American, pizza has to be a pretty good guess. Either way, we give a lot of personal information out regarding who we are and what we like.
In your inner circle of family and friends you can not expect to be able to hide this information. They lived with you or grew up with you, they know the answers without having to search your profile. However, it is not your inner circle that you should be worried about, it is a friend of a friend that you don’t know that you should worry about. Did you know that by default most social networking sites allow your profile information to be seen by friends of friends. So if you have 100 fiends who can see your profile information and they each have 100 friends who can also see your information (only 2 degrees of separation) then there are over 10,000 people who can now see your personal profile information.
Those 10,000 people can also see your comments about when you are away from the house to go on vacation. They can also see those pictures of your party the other night where you new laptops is sitting on the table in the background. They also can see pictures of you that you thought only your closest friends could see. Including that one of your in the swimsuit at the beach last summer. How about the photo from that party where you over did it on the Sambuca? Do you want 10,000 people having access to those pictures.
My suggestion is that you take the time to manage your information and the risk associated with sharing that information with others. In whichever social networking site you use, FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Hyves, etc. take a few minutes today to find out how you can control who see what on your profile. All of these sites offer you the chance to say, “allow only my network or friends to see this profile”
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In preparing this blog I went to a few social networking sites to find links for you on this topic. They are posted below. Unfortunately, LinkedIn had little to no easily found information on this topic and therefore no link.
FaceBook Privacy Settings http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy#!
MySpace Privacy Information http://www.myspace.com/Modules/ContentManagement/Pages/page.aspx?placement=privacy_settings
LinkedIn (nothing found beyond privacy policy)
Hyves (in Dutch) http://www.hyves.nl/help/?category=Privacy,%20pesten%20en%20spam
Twitter http://twitter.com/privacy
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www.pleaserobme.com « Information Risk Plim // February 20, 2010 at 12:27 pm
[...] Blogs of Information Risk Plim ( Social Network Attacks Triple and What does your on-line profiles say about you?)have been related to how to carefully use social networking sites like Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn [...]
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