10 tips to take control of your Social Networking Safety ~ My Digital Life

Today almost everybody seems to be on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. People are reconnecting with old friends, making new ones and exchanging information like photos, videos, and personal messages. Since the popularity of such social sites is huge, so are the risks of using them. Due to huge traffic of these sites, hackers, spammers, identity thieves and other criminals usually lay their trap to catch their unsuspecting prey on such sites. Usually online communities require you to provide personal information. For starters, you may be just providing a username, password and email address. You may then be suggested to fill out a user profile that includes much more personal information, such as your birth date, your home and work addresses, home and work phone numbers, gender, marital status, occupation, instant messaging names, and much more. But these profiles are generally public (unless you had the wisdom to control access to your profile through privacy settings) and some sites permit their members to view lists of other group members' screen names and sometimes even their email addresses and full profiles as well. Your profile may even appear in a google search. Your comments or other posts are permanently recorded on the community site. Even if you delete a particular post, your friends would have already received a notification with full content, which alas you cannot delete on your own. Once the community begins to sound casual and familiar, you might be lulled into a false sense of security and be tempted to share more personal information which may become a gold mine for spammers or cyber-criminals. It's time that you should begin to take control of your personal information on the net. To help you in this task, here are 10 useful tips.

Think before you post. Don't post information that you're not comfortable sharing with strangers. Don't ever share your email address, phone numbers, address, banking details or credit card information online in a forum, group or a social networking site. Don't reveal even your friend's information without his or her approval. If you have to pass such an information to one or multiple of your friends, use either private messages or email. Always ask your friends to delete such a message after having retrieved your information. Or use a self destructing email service.

Choose your friends wisely. No matter how real your online interactions may seem but they are simply not quite like hanging out with friends. You may be actually be revealing your personal information to a much wider audience than you realize. Your online friend list may consist a cocktail of your family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances and complete strangers. It is therefore imperative that you must think twice about whom to accept as a friend. Choose only your family, close friends, mutual friends and people you know personally in the real world. Periodically, review who has access to your posts as friends do change over time. Identity thieves may create fake profiles in order to glean sensitive information from you, a phenomenon known as "Social Engineering". So accepting that friend request from that hot looking girl you have never known is a big emphatic no. Read up my earlier post to learn about managing your Facebook friends.

Think carefully about how public you want your profile to be. In Facebook, you can easily adjust privacy settings that control your profile. You can even have a preview of how your profile appears to a friend or a stranger. You can also use privacy settings to control what to share with whom. You can know more about Facebook selective sharing in my previous post as mentioned above.

Always assume that everything you put on a social networking site is permanent. Even if you can delete your account, anyone on the net can easily print photos or text or save images and videos to a computer. Therefore follow the golden rule above- "Think before you post". Don't post anything which you may ordinarily only share with your close friends. Alternatively, use selective sharing as described earlier or set up a secret group of your intimate friends or family.

Use caution when you click links that you receive in messages or mail from your friends on your social website so as be safe from phishing. Always treat links in messages on these sites as you would do with other email messages. Read the description of the link and check whether it tallies to the link target (most email clients allow to know about link target by hovering your mouse over the link). For eg. if the link suggests a banking website, the target URL should also point to the same. Look carefully for intended typos in the URL like www.facebok.com instead of www.facebook.com. Keep your browser updated as newer updates usually always have better security features (but don't forget to turn them on). And even if satisfied, always copy paste the link in a new browser tab as by clicking a suspected link from your email you might be entering your account name and password into a fake site where your personal information could be stolen.

Don't use social networking sites while at work or in a public place where your computer can be accessed by others. If you really have to, ensure to activate the "Private Browsing" mode which all major browsers offer nowadays. Pages you view in this stealth mode or incognito mode won't appear in your browser history or search history, and they won't leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the private window. Any files you download or bookmarks you create will be preserved, however. But beware that it does not protect you from websites recording your stats or from people standing behind your back!

Know what you've posted on the net about yourself. A common way that hackers break into financial or other accounts is by using the 'Forgot your password?' link on the account login page. To break into your account, they search for the answers to your security questions, such as your birthday, home town, high school class, or mother's middle name. Here is an interesting anecdote about how a guy broke into his friend's account knowing only general information about her. If the site you are signing up with allows, make up your own password questions, and don't draw them from material anyone could find with a quick web search. So, if you have used such simple questions for password change, then it would be better to rectify the mistake immediately with at least all your financial and personal sites.

Try to maintain separate email accounts for your personal, official, financial and social life. And if possible, even a separate email account for the numerous sites you join on internet everyday and forget or do not need to access later on. Of-course, you may use email aliases as described in my another previous post as they would also be able to pin-point the source of the leak of your email address as well as keep you secure from automatic harvesting of emails by running a script. But remember that aliases cannot prevent a person to correctly guess your email address. If you are wary of having to manage multiple email accounts, you can easily use your smartphone to manage your email accounts as many newer phones like iPhone 4 are already providing the facility of a unified inbox. Or alternatively, you can set all your mails from secondary accounts to be automatically forwarded to you main account thereby effectively masking your real email address. Gmail even gives you the option to send email from any account and hence mimicking as if the email originated from your selected address, thereby again masking your real email address.

Protect your accounts by using strong passwords. Passwords should be long and include upper case & lower case letters, numbers and symbols. You should ideally have a separate password for each of your online accounts but since it may be quite difficult to remember all of them, you may at least segregate your passwords as suggested for email accounts. For example, your banking passwords should never be used on a social site. Click here to learn how to create and remember a strong password.

Don't become paranoid. Lastly, remember that most people you would meet online are genuine and decent but as is the case in real world, some are just rotten apples. They could misuse the information you disclose to malign you, harass you, steal your identity, plunder your banking account, gain access to your computers in order to send spam or commit cyber crimes and may even jeopardize your and your family's physical safety.

So it's time to get your online home in order. Look in the attics for things forgotten (find and delete information you would like to keep private), clean up all the cobwebs (organize your social and email accounts), reinforce your security using strong padlocks (reset privacy options and strong passwords) and throw out the undesirable guests who are overstaying (unfriend or block undesirable friends). Secure your online word now!