5 Hidden dangers of Facebook

Over the last few years, Facebook's growth has been phenomenal. The world's no. 1 social networking site also sometime back beat Google to become the most visited Web site in the US for an entire week at a stretch. However, the site has also lately being receiving lot of flak for its privacy policies. 

An expert in online privacy drew attention to the five dangers of sharing information on social networking site Facebook. Joan Goodchild, senior editor of CSO (Chief Security Officer) Online, said that marketing efforts by the company often results in a compromise on account holders' privacy. 

Goodchild noted five risks of using Facebook. They are:
Risk 1: Your information is being shared with third parties

According to Facebook policy last updated on April 2010, "When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends' names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting. ... The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to "everyone." ... Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page. If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection."
Risk 2: Privacy settings revert to a less safe default mode after each redesign

In March, private e-mail according to a Gawker report, private email addresses that many Facebook users wanted to keep hidden were revealed publicly on a multitude of Facebook profiles. The glitch was later resolved by Facebook.
Risk 3: Facebook ads may contain malware

 Recently, a Facebook event invitation was reportedly sent to some over 2,300 friends of Jim Breyer, Accel Partners venture capitalist who sits on Facebook's board of directors, asking "Would you like a Facebook phone number?" However, the message was actually a scam and the users who entered their passwords in response to the message in turn sent the whole thing to their friends lists too. 

"This was a phishing scam and Jim's account appears to have been compromised," read a statement from Facebook as provided to venture industry news site PEHub.
Risk 4: Your friends unknowingly make you vulnerable

 On May 6th, the popular social network patched a major security bug that allowed users to snoop on their friends' private chats, and view their pending friend requests. The exploit forced Facebook to temporarily disable chat.
Risk 5: Scammers are create fake profiles

 Earlier this week, 15 privacy and consumer protection organizations filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that the site manipulates privacy settings to make users' personal information available for commercial use. 


Courtesy:TOI-Tech

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Building REST API in Python using FastAPI

Image
Building REST API in Python using FastAPI In this article I will discuss some basics about RESTful webservice and developing a web service in Python using Fast API framework. First let’s see what a RESTful service is. REST stands for Representational state transfer. It is a standard for developing interactive applications that use web services. We have multiple architectural guiding constraints in developing RESTful services. For detailed information on RESTful services, I recommend to below resources: ·         https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer ·         https://flask-restful.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ (Flask is another Python framework for building web services) What is FastAPI? FastAPI is a modern high-performance web framework that with Python3.6+ based on standard Python. While there are many articles out there mentioning about performance of FastAPI, the FastAPI documentation itself has explained very well about the benchmarks and speed wi
Read more

Connect Smartly to Your Baby With Owlet Sock

Image
Owlet, a startup based out of Utah has introduced the smart sock for new born babies. This smart sock uses a hospital technology Pulse oximetry, which is test to measure the oxygen level of blood.The smart sock owlet will alert if baby stops breathing. Owlet is wireless and gentle. This sends signals to independent base station. The independent base station has both green and red light indicator. The green light keeps glowing for normal heart rate, when heart rate or oxygen appear to be out of normal range the independent base stations glows up red light. And now to monitor the numerical values you need an apple device. The owlet application works on any device running iOS 8 or higher. Using the application you can monitor heart rate and oxygen level. When either heart rate or oxygen level is out of normal range then owlet alarms from base station and phone.
Read more