Facebook Safety; Friendship Addiction; Social Networking;

information about you. A common hacking tool is called “social engineering” whereby a hacker psychologically manipulates situations to gain further information about you to fill in missing gaps that he/she needs to con you. For example, many people use their child’s name as their password on their computer, or their birth date, or any easy to remember information. By creating a trust relationship with you, you may without knowing it, be giving possible passwords/access information to a hacker as he/she attempts to create a psychological profile of you.

If you lose your credit card or your identity document, Fb becomes even more unsafe. If the person who finds these personal documents becomes a friend of yours on Fb (or if your profile is open to the public), then the balance of your personal information is available. Cases of fraud regularly occur in the work environment whereby a fellow co-worker is involved in fraudulent activity either directly or indirectly via a partner. In the work environment, information such as identity numbers, home phone numbers and possibly addresses are fairly easily available in many companies. It is also common for co-workers to be friends on Fb, the rest is self-explanatory.  The point is that, the more information there is available about you, even more information can be obtained from that very information. Thus, fraudulent activity becomes easier with more information. Phishing (technique of fraudulently obtaining private information)  is a common occurrence that takes many forms such as emails from legitimately looking companies attempting to update their database, and requiring you to confirm details via email or telephone for example. The more information there is available about you, the more openings there are for fraudsters to gain entrance into your life. The possibilities are endless and the methods used to con people too are endless.

Psychologically deviant behaviour is a concern for public forums. We need to be aware that child friendly websites have been known to attract not only children but paedophiles too. Facebook has a minimum age for membership of 14 years of age. Paedophilia is a concern for young teenagers and I would not rule this out as a concern for parents just because “every one’s child is on Fb and therefore it must be safe”. If this was true then crossing a street would pose no risks as everyone is doing it… . The point is that parental involvement is always important. I am not saying that one needs to be like a hawk, but what I am saying is that teaching your children about the risks and role-playing possible scenarios that they may be faced with, is an important part of any new activity that has risks. For example, the same way a parent needs to oversee a child when learning to swim (and thereafter for many years of swimming), the same applies for internet based activities. Excuses such as my children know more than me and they teach me about computers is a common complaint. It is easy to get advice and that does not mean that you need to be a computer specialist, but as a parent you already have the knowledge of what would be acceptable behaviours for your children, so it’s just the vehicle that you need to adapt to. This can be fun too.

Facebook provides a perfect place for voyeuristic behaviour (the sexual interest in or practice of spying on people, usually while they are doing personal actions). Once a Fb user lets another Fb user see his/her profile by accepting a friendship, the profile remains open to each party unless either the friend is removed from the profile (“unfriend”- Oxford word of the year for 2009) or privacy settings are applied. Now if your profile is open to your friends, these friends can view your photos, videos and other information at any time and as many times as they want. This activity goes unnoticed, so if one of your friends looks at a particular photo album of yours once or 50 times, you would not know. Why is this important you may ask? Well many people provide holiday pictures of themselves and some even include pictures that may be sexually appealing to a would be viewer of your profile. Does this mean that one should only show pictures of themselves with full winter clothing? No of course not, it’s merely to be aware that if you have a stack of friends and you also have a stack of photos for example, there may be people obsessing over these photos to a degree that may bother you if you were aware of this obsession. It is about awareness, and I am sure many people use Fb as a meeting forum and thus some attractive pictures are status quo for such people, however, there are people who derive a benefit from your media and this may pose a risk to you and/or your family. As we see how easily celebrities can become idolised merely from excessive exposure and there is much research regarding this topic. Continuous viewing of people’s media creates familiarity without the actual

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