Articles : Social Networking Site Safety Tips : Facebook, Myspace, Flixster, Linkedin, Orkut, Twitter
Social networking sites have become an integral part of our daily life. Major Social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Flixster, Linkedin and micro blogging site Twitter are growing exponentially as more number of people signup to these sites to keep in touch with their friends and colleagues.
Even though these new generation social bookmarking sites provide many attractive features to keep in touch with friends, is very important to take some precautionary measures to safeguard from harmful activities by hackers and cyber criminals. Here are some basic tips to increase your safety while using such sites.
1. Never put your important personal details like phone number, full address, bank account details, credit card number, driving license number, passport number, PAN card details etc in your profile.
2. Never disclose your personal details or confidential information with any of your online friends. Even if the other person is a trusted one it is not completely safe to tranfer via online method as a third person can easly steal those information when you send it by exploiting some security loopholes in Operating System or Browser or Network. Also a spyware or malware in receiving person's computer can steal the data.
3. It is very easy to create anonymous profiles in all major social networking and bookmarking sites. So be careful while dealing with unknown and new online friends. Dont believe anybody blindly.
4. Remember that posted information will remain in some servers and other people's computer's browser cache even if you delete it from your account.
5. It is better not to post your personal photos. It can easily be altered and posted in a manner which you may not like it.
6. Be careful when you click on external links. Links embedded with malicious codes can steal your password and other important details.
7. Dont fully trust online messages even if it is from your close friends. Hackers can break into their account and send you messages that look like they're from your friends.
8. Be careful while adding third party software and plug-ins to your account. Some applications may steal your personal information or contain malicious codes.
9. It is better not to use your personal or official email ids for sign up. Create a new email id and use that for social networking and similar sites and give only that id in your profile and to online friends.
10. Keep your computer clean by installing latest anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-malware and firewall softwares and install all latest Operating system and Browser updates and patches to make it completely secure.
11. Choose a very strong password with numbers and special characters and keep changing it often. Never save your password in any online applications and keep different password for different accounts.
12. Check your password hint questions once in a while and make sure that you remember the answer correctly. Dont give very easy questions like name of your school or your city name.
Famous Social Networking Sites are Facebook, Myspace, Qzone, Netlog, Twitter, Friendster, Tagged, Orkut, Flixster, Linkedin, Livejournal, Hi5 and Windows Live.
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