Facebook Safety; Friendship Addiction; Social Networking;

interpersonal relationship developing. The effects of this can be seen by simply observing how people respond to seeing someone in real life to whom they know from TV or who is famous.

A recent violent murder in Pretoria (South Africa) whereby a schoolgirl was found dead is believed to be linked to someone she had met on Facebook. It is difficult to trace such a link and that is one of the dark sides to social networking. There have been numerous incidents of people being attacked by “friends” they met online. One such incident involved a student from Virginia (USA) who was murdered by someone she met on MySpace (another online social network). Cases like these are on the increase. One possible reason for this is that it is difficult to get background information about new online friends and there are many people who lie about their profile information. Awareness of the risks is important.

What can one do to reduce possible negative effects of social networking? Earlier in the article, four questions were posed. Some further proactive steps include:

Become familiar with Fb’s Privacy settings. They allow for each user to create personalised privacy controls. For example, it is possible to allow some of your friends to view your photo albums, while other friends cannot see these albums. Thus you can partition your friends into groups, possibly – family and close friends, not so close friends, and then past friends and acquaintances. It is easy to set this up and easy to select your friends into your new groups. Then the next time you upload your new photo album just select which groups of friends you want to allow access to view it. You can also choose directly from your friends list, but it is easier to pre-group your friends. To find these settings look to the top left corner of your screen and select “account settings” then choose “privacy settings” and then “profile information”. A menu of all your account settings will be shown. For photo albums, just select “photo albums” menu and there you will find a customisable option. Customisation is available for any of your information fields on Fb. It is good practice to go through all the available settings even if you only change a few. For example, if you type a person’s name into a Google search, Fb results too will come up unless you explicitly change that setting in Fb. Thus, some settings are already set to open access, unless you change it yourself.

Having set up your personalised privacy, check that your login credentials are also secure. Passwords that are linked to your personal information such as children’s names, favourite colours, and birthdates are easy to hack. A mixture of numbers and names is stronger. Special characters such as the ones where you need to press the shift key also add strength. Another method to use is not a password as such but passwords, or a “pass-sentence”. Even a short sentence such as “I like Fb!” is harder to hack than a single long word. Password hacking software relies on the commonly used words first and then words with numbers and most struggle with sentences.
When creating an account on Fb, it asks for your email address as your username. Most people leave this as their username. This also poses a risk as in your profile information which is available to your friends (and possibly to the public), it is likely that you have put your email address there. Thus for a hacker, he/she already has half your login details and now just needs your password.

Observe your own Fb use. There are many new cases of people who become psychologically reliant on Fb. New terms such as “friendship addiction” have been used to describe some of the symptoms associated with this problem. Social networking sites while beneficial to many older adults by reducing feelings of isolation, may create an unhealthy obsession for teenagers and adults. This is particularly true for vulnerable groups such as women or men who obtain self-esteem from relationships as well as recovering addicts (substance abusers, shopping addicts etc). There are people who actively seek to take advantage of vulnerable people and attempt to exploit their weaknesses for personal gain.
A group on Fb called “Facebook Junky and proud of it!” describes the criteria they believe to be a deciding factor to gain entrance to their group. The group believe that if you are checking your Fb profile more often than your email; if you are more interested to see what is going on with your virtual friends than your real world friends; if you would be psychologically disturbed if Fb was shut off for a few days; and/or if you could use the terms obsessive or compulsive to describe the way you use Fb, you have met the admission requirements for this group. Surprisingly there were only 74 members of this group at the time of writing. The point is, time spent on Fb is time away from other parts of your life. Finding the balance is the

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