1) Provide limited personal information about you on your profile about your past, interest or location. That information can be used to track you down by unknown.
2) Never share your phone number or cell number on any status update or on any comments. Friend’s sometimes ask on your wall post to share your number and without thinking too much people share the number. This may be publicly available to unknowns.
3) Never share your email address on any status updated or on any comments like the cell phone. You might start receiving fake emails from strangers.
4) Never share your Date of Birth on your profile. Atleast, try to hide a year you born. Sometimes people set their account password as date of birth or combination with date of birth. If this information gets into hackers hand, they might brute force or guess your password easily and can hack your account.
5) Never share your personal photos publicly on Facebook. You can set 1 or 2 photos for your profile but sharing so many photos on your profiles leads to photo leakage. Some strangers can take advantages of these photos to trouble you. Share with your known friend’s atleast. Atleast tell your children’s not to share their photos on their profile.
6) Never share any status update publicly on Facebook. Facebook has privacy settings where you can only update your status with friends or limited audience. If you share your updates publicly that may be a privacy issue for you.
7) Never accept unknown friend request from strangers on Facebook. Sometimes, people create fake accounts so that they can send you a friend request. They can’t see your information due to privacy settings setup by you to only allow friends to see your full profile. Try to ask or do some home work before you accept any unknown friend request.
8) Never allow application which requests you to share personal information like email address. Facebook has number of applications which require your permission to access your personal information. Basic information is enough for good applications but if application requests sharing your email address or posting on your wall on your behalf, do not allow them. Think if that information can be shared with third party or may be that application can be used for other purpose of if the application gets hacked. You leak your information.
9) Never click on any link from the status messages of your friends which offer freebies. A lot of fake scams are spreading on the Facebook by the attackers. If you click on any suspicious link, you might infect yourself and your friends with same status message. For example, status message may tell you, Facebook is giving free t-shirts and if you want to grab that free t-shirt, click on the link. You won’t get anything for free on Facebook rather scammer earns money asking you to take paid surveys.
10) Never install application which convinces you to reveal hidden Facebook information. Scammers creates fake Facebook applications which when installed, post the similar status messages on your wall post in order to spread it. The application post status messages like “check if a friend has deleted you” or “Check who have viewed your profile information”. The application then asks you to complete few surveys before it can reveal the hidden information. The scammers earn money and you lose your time and you infect others.
The above are small list of DONTs people can follow in order to secure their privacy on social networking sites such as Facebook. If you like this information become our Facebook fan and spread this with your dear ones.
