Making new Facebook friends could get you burgled
It’s no secret that posting your vacation plans online can be a security risk if your home address is also visible. But one insurance firm says many people are still taking a gamble even when they think they are keeping such details hidden from public view.
Legal and General says 38 percent of social networking site users have posted updates about main vacations and 33 percent have posted about plans to go away for the weekend. That’s a well known problem where people’s home addresses are visible online. The firm says more than one in six people have seen residential addresses posted on publicly available pages. That’s not necessarily an informative stat (it could mean many people seeing the same addresses), but the firm did also discover 5 percent of users have their home address published on their profile pages.
In theory such details are only available to online friends, but it seems some people are lax about that qualification. The researchers sent Facebook friend requests to 100 random users and found 13 accepted the request without asking for any further details, thus making their ‘private’ information available to a complete stranger.
The firm says people who are particularly easy to target in this way are new members with few friends (who will be looking to extend their network) and those with large numbers of friends (who probably aren’t picky). Another vulnerable group is loner men who are much more likely to accept requests from female strangers with an attractive profile picture.
However, the groups the firm considers most worthwhile to target include those with a particularly wide variety of holiday pictures: the logic goes that they are likely to be away from home for longer and will have more valuable property to go after.
People whose posts and pictures show them to be avid pet lovers are also a potential target as cats mean catflaps (which usually make a door less sturdy and secure) while dog owners are more likely to go for walks regularly and not bother locking doors. In both cases alarms are more likely to be switched off to avoid being set off accidentally by pet movements.
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