Tag: Facebook

Is Facebook the riskiest social networking site? According to a survey by Sophos released last week, 72% of companies surveyed indicated they had concerns about the safety of employees using the Facebook social networking site. The concern was that an increase in viruses and other computer infections were a direct result of employees using Facebook on company computers.

As a member of the IT department on a college campus, I can vouch for the concern. It is incredibly easy to transmit nasties via links, applications, and messages on Facebook. Most Facebook users think that if it’s coming through Facebook, whether it is through a friend’s status posting, a wall posting, an invitation to an application, or through an email, then it must be virus free and safe. This is, of course, not the case, as any link has the potential to be infected, as does any application, even if approved by Facebook. These things are not automatically vetted through any kind of oversight on Facebook’s part, and people should handle anything coming to them through Facebook with the same caution as anything coming to them through their email inbox.

I am constantly amazed at how often friends and family’s computers are infected. It is well-known that I use no virus protection on my own personal laptop (that no one ever uses but me) and I’ve never gotten a virus or trojan. Yet my family, who should know better, are constantly needing me to fix some problem or other that resulted from a virus or trojan they picked up by visiting some link someone gave them, or opening an email from someone that would, to me, have looked suspicious. It is frustrating as a geek to deal with these issues repeatedly. The attitude is, “it was on Facebook, it was safe, right?”

The Sophos study is quite extensive and I recommend at least looking over what is there to prepare yourself for future issues you may deal with when it comes to viruses coming from social networking sites. At the very least, it’s a heads up!

There is a great article in the New York Times (link may not work after a few days – since NYT is going to a paywall) about setting your privacy settings on Facebook to the best advantage. I, like many others, find the new “privacy” rules pretty confusing, not knowing what means what. The article outlines three things you should look at in your profile. I’m going to synopsize these here.

1. Right now, the default is for everyone in Facebook-land to see your posts, status updates, pictures, and etc. You probably don’t want that, so go to your settings, privacy settings, profile information, then change the “posts by me” setting to “friends only.” This will lock down that opening.

2. Your personal information, like birthdays, relationship status, political or religious affiliations, or family information may be visible with the Facebook default settings. To change this, youa re once again going to go to settings, privacy settings, profile information, and set “birthday,” “religious and political views,” and “family and relationship” to “friends only.”

3. The third concern is that much of what you post on Facebook can end up being indexed on search engines. While that might be harmless, I err on the side of it not being harmless, and choose to disallow letting that stuff out to search engines. To change this, go to settings, then choose search, and un-check the “allow” box.

You can tweak individual settings on your profile page. Most of my stuff is set to “friends only” which keeps any of that information out of the view of those I don’t know, in general. Just remember that even Facebook is not truly private, and that there is always a chance your information will get out and be available for viewing by complete strangers, so caution is still urged when you are posting in Facebook.