Social Networking Caution

By Paromeeta Ray

Category: computer

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Having more than a hundred friends in your orkut friend list may seem cool, but do you know the risks of networking and the ways to guard against them?

The popular social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and orkut attract millions of people from different corners of the world who can get exposed to grave risks like cheating, identity theft, stalking and more.

But you can make great friends, meet wonderful people, discover old, long-lost school pals, connect with people having similar interests from all over the world and have great fun with social networking sites, only if you are ready to take some sensible precautions without being gullible with strangers.

Some fundamental precautions:

a) Learn about the privacy policy of the website you are joining. If you feel uncomfortable with the thought of displaying your personal conversation with a close friend to the entire world, you can adopt restrictive measures provided by some of these sites, so that only close friends can see your information and read your conversations.
b) Do not believe, everything you read in an unknown person’s profile, or everything that person is telling you about, himself, or herself.
c) If you find something or somebody suspicious, you should report to the website via its abuse reporting option.
d) If you are uploading your photographs, do it after knowing that those photographs will be open to the entire world for tampering and misuse, which may endanger your honor in a way you are not even being able to imagine. To help you in maintaining privacy, sites today have album-locking options, which enable you to restrict the access to your photos only to your close friends.
e) Only post those information, statements and materials, which you do not mind strangers and newly made acquaintances knowing. Though you can delete them on having second thoughts, those might have got saved on someone else’s computer, by then.
f) Username you choose for logging in to the site should not contain any personal information.
g) Avoid exposing your full name, maiden name, nickname, mother’s maiden name, address, phone and mobile numbers or any other personal details, to save your passwords from being deciphered, or yourself from being put to the risks of unwanted intrusion and trouble.