Consumer Reports highlights social networking security dangers
Consumer Reports magazine has published a report highlighting some of the dangers of failing to protect private data on social networking sites. It’s hardly revolutionary advice, but may reach a less tech-savvy audience.
Some of the details in the report are basic points: bad people can download your profile pic and use it as their own, while not everyone who contacts you online is telling the truth.
But there’s also some genuinely worrying points. The report quotes one security analyst who ran an experiment distributing a Facebook app which posts messages on friends’ walls restating and outdoing their status updates in Kanye West fashion. The analyst was then able to collect the profile data of everyone involved along with the browser history of everyone who installed the app.
The problem there is that although Facebook does require developers to ask permission to collect personal data when running their apps, all too many of us have simply got into the habit of clicking the acceptance button without a second thought.
The magazine also highlights the risks of clicking on URLs produced by shortening services such as bit.ly, particularly given the possibility of them appearing in bogus messages sent through hijacked Twitter accounts.
There’s also a list of seven “Don’ts” for Facebook:
- Use a weak password (easier to hack)
- Publish your full date of birth (identity theft risk)
- Simply leave privacy settings on default
- Caption pictures of your child
- Highlight that you’ll be away from home
- Leave your page accessible to search engines
- Allow children to use the site unsupervised
It would be easy to dismiss this advice as blindingly obvious, but it’s worth remembering the audience it’s going to. Consumer Reports has an audience of 4 million and, while those readers are inherently not dummies (quite the opposite), they don’t necessarily keep up to date with Internet security issues.
And let’s be fair: how many of us more technologically-minded folks can say we’ve never been anything other than 100 percent security-minded on Facebook?
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