How To Stay Safe While Using Social Network Sites?

By Author: Ann Philip
Total Articles: 91
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Social network is the group of individuals who share thoughts or acquire new information on subjects of common interest. In schools and colleges students meet at a common place to share information on academic related topics. Common people conduct meetings to discuss and to gather information about games, gardening, cooking, business, marketing trends and about different new products, or to expand their friendship circle.

Online social networking or social sites gives more opportunities. Now people living in any part of the world can meet and discuss about their area of interest by being online. Online social networking sites are like online communities. Online websites offers people an option to share common interest on religion, politics or hobbies. Social networking sites help you to keep in touch with your high school friends and make new friends. You can create your own profile and read others profile. Social networking sites assist in connecting with people whom you think can become your good friends.

Some of the commonly used social networking sites are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, LiveJournal, ...
... Orkut, Tagged, Cafemom,Ning and Meetup. Among these sites, Facebook, twitter and linkedIn has got highest ranks in Alexa global traffic rank. I am using Facebook and Orkut on my home computer linked to service from providers like XFINITY Deals to connect with my friends. While usage of social networking sites is consistently increasing year after year, people who spend time on these sites varies from country to country. As per a survey, people of Israel are spending more time on social network sites. They spend nearly 11 pours on these sites per month. Russia has the second place with about 10.5 hours in a month per visitor.

What all thing you can do on social networking sites?

You can create your own profile.
You can upload your own and others photos or even create an album and share with others.
You can message and chat with people around the world.
You can collect other peoples information and their photos.
You can post your comments on the common wall.
You can play games.
Collect latest information.
Social networking sites are good mediums to collect business contacts.
You can create your own family, school, religion or political communities.

Though features of social networking sites differ, they all provide information about you and offer some communication mechanism like forums, email, instant chatting and common private chat rooms. As this is a common public medium, anyone can use this. So misuse of data is possible here. Hackers can steal your data and create customized applications, which can be viruses that can infect your system and destroy the data. One should be cautious when giving data on social networking sites.

How can you avoid hackers or phishing attacks?

Limit the personal information given in profiles- Do not include your personal contact information like phone number, address or about your daily schedule in the personal profile. To avoid the misuse of data and photos, try to protect it with a password.

Social networking sites are public resources – As anyone can access profiles, so post information that are comfortable with anyone seeing. People are reporting issues related to misuse of photos and phone numbers day by day.

Avoid sharing data with strangers – Internet makes it easy for people to hide their identification. Consider limiting the people who can make contacts with you. If you get a chance to interact with strangers, try to limit sharing personal information with them.

Use unbreakable password - By setting your data and photos in a password protected mode, you can protect your data for a certain extent.

Constantly evaluate settings – Some of the social networking sites make personal profiles available to public. By changing the settings mode you can restrict the sharing of data and photos.

Use of anti-virus software - It is advisable to use an anti-virus software to protect data.

At present, children are more susceptible to threats from social networking sites. So elders should take care of them when they use social networking sites.

As a freelancer, Ann is interested in writing about social networking sites and its impact on public. She is a regular user of online social networking sites like Facebook and Orkut with connection from Xfinity Deals.