social media safety tips

Use caution when you click links that you receive in messages from your friends on social website. Treat links in messages on these sites as you would treat links in e-mail messages.

Always remember what you’ve posted about yourself. A common way that hackers break into financial or other accounts is by clicking the “Forgot your password?” link on the account login page. To break into your account, they search for the answers to your security questions, such as your birthday, hometown, high school class, father’s middle name, on your social networking site. If the site allows, make up your own password questions, and don’t draw them from material anyone could find with a quick search.

Don’t trust that a message is really from one who has been shown there. Hackers can break into accounts and send messages that looks like they’re from your friends, but they aren’t. If you suspect that a message is fraudulent, use an alternate method to contact your friend to find out its veracity. This includes invitations to join new social networks.

To avoid fetching of e-mail addresses of your friends, do not allow social networking services to scan your e-mail address book. When you join a new social network, you might receive an offer to enter your e-mail address and password to find out if your contacts are on the network. The site might use this information to send e-mail messages to everyone in your contact list or even to everyone you’ve ever sent an e-mail message with that e-mail address. Social networking sites should explain that they’re going to do this, but some do not.

Type the address of your social networking site directly into your browser or use your personal bookmarks. If you click a link to your site through e-mail or another website, you might be entering your account name and password into a fake site where your personal information could be stolen.

Be selective about one whom you accept as a friend on a social network. Identity thieves might create fake profiles in order to get information from you.

Choose your social network carefully. Evaluate the site that you plan to use and make sure that you understand the privacy policy. Find out if the site monitors content that people post. You will be providing personal information to this website, so carefully examine that the site where you are going to provide details of your credit card.

Assume that everything you put on a social networking site is permanent. Even if you delete your account, anyone on the Internet can easily print photos or text or save images or screenshots or videos in his device.

Be careful about installing extras on your site. Many social networking sites allow you to download third-party applications that let you do more with your personal page. Criminals sometimes use these applications to steal your personal information. To download and use third-party applications safely, take the same safety precautions that you take with any other program or file, you download from the Web.

Think twice before you use social networking sites at work.

Talk to your kids about social networking & brief them about DO’s & Don’t’s.