Facebook are they selling your information?

FACEBOOK is it selling your information or inadvertently allowing access to possible hackers and identity thieves?

Everyone in my home is connected to Facebook. I have found it to be an excellent means to maintain access to friends and family as well as a way to find long lost friends and family. I am careful about what information I display on my business and personal pages and I am wary for my children. Facebook being hacked mildly disturbed me but since they don’t outright sell our information I felt comfortable with being my own watchdog for my family. Yet I am not a hacker nor am I a cyber genius. I do not even consider myself to be among the computer elite. I have been online from the first business machines offered by IBM to business offices in the late 80’s and have continued to used them professionally and personally. We have a desktop in the living room where all the children access YouTube and whatever anime characters or musicians and singers they favor this month. I have used it for bill paying and research until I was able to buy a router and work from the laptop in my room or office. We were able to hook up our equipment originally to the phone lines to enable us to fax and dial out. Now an ethernet cable runs into the house from a modem and into the router so some of us are wifi aficionados and others are bound to the desktop where we can keep an eye on their youthful journeys into the cyber world.

Every now and then one of my Facebook family publishes an update on a problem that you need to be aware of and I felt relatively safe. Now I’ve read in Yahoo news that someone pulled the information from 170 million people of the 500 million on Facebook. They have basically archived the information and it is obtainable by almost anyone. So Facebook may not be selling my, yours, our information but if they are a business machine run by advertising dollars and exposure so how can they not benefit when so many have access to the information they are making readily available.

I've learned that it is important to constantly review your account and your privacy settings. If you find that you are one of your friends you must immediately go into your account settings and delete yourself from your friends list. It is a way for hackers to get into your account. If you are wondering why this is so important you must realize that with minimal information superior and diligent hackers and identity thieves can find out more of your information through small tidbits of information. Most people don’t know that social security cards are often a give away to your year of birth. While in junior high school we were given applications for our social security cards. So when I meet individuals whose social security number starts with the same three numbers as mine we are usually born in the same year. I worked part time in retail on and off for twenty years and social security numbers had to be called in for a customer to obtain an in store credit card.

Your profile page in Facebook and other similar networking sites is set up to accept limited but sometimes fruitful information to an identity thief. It allows you to display your full name or your government as the kids say. You can also list your address, or the city you live in, your actual date of birth, your home or cell phone numbers and your valid email addresses. If you are hounded by unwanted solicitations it can often be traced back to individuals who have obtained your email address and sold them in bulk to spammers. At one time we were warned to blind cc on all of our email forwards to stop people from amassing huge listings of valid email addresses but this is no longer the primary means of obtaining them.

Now we all need to check our accounts on a regular basis. After you confirm that you are not one of your friends you need to see what all of your privacy settings are set on. When Facebook and other networks update their systems it can cause some of them to reset to their original settings which are usually always in an accessible position. Go to your account, then privacy setting, basic directory information and view your settings. Have you set them to where only your selected “friends” have access, to where their friends also have access or to where everyone has access? While in privacy settings also review and or edit the access that games, applications or websites have to your information. If “enable public search” is engaged then the public can search and recover your information. I set my profile so that only my friends have access to it. Now I have read that if my friend’s profiles are public someone can access my information through them, even some of my personal information that only they were to have access to.

There is a tab on the page to “preview” your profile. Checking this preview allows you to see what information from your page is displayed when someone searches and comes upon your profile. So basically it is important to hide your complete date of birth, only put up partial information. My family and I love to send birthday greetings so don’t include the year you were born. Don’t put your age on your page because then they have your birth year, duh (my personal favorite). If your cell phone or home phone isn’t listed then they can’t reverse directory to your name and address, or can they. I pay my local provider to publish my listing with my first initial and last name only. I have always done that so my listing doesn’t tell someone, single woman living alone. But that’s old school and most sophisticated hackers and thieves are aware that we do that. I would use reverse directories and check to see if my information came up before I displayed my private numbers in an open forum. I personally only list my business phone number on my business page.

My Grandmother always said better safe than sorry. Her words of wisdom have come back to bite me on the butt more than once.

Identity theft isn't a relatively new crime. In the early 80's while I was in college a friend found out her roomate had purchased a car using her social security number and work information. When we went to the dealership the salesperson said she wasn't the person who purchased the car from him. She didn't have the financial ability to take the issue to court and when the girl didn't make the payments it left an ugly blemish on her credit report for years. The police did not treat her kindly because they didn't believe her story.

You may even think that you don't have anything that anyone could take from you. Or that currently your finances aren't in a great position anyway. I can say from personal experience that what goes down does eventually go back up again over time. And when your circumstances improve you don't want any ugly blemishes on your credit report that you didn't put there yourself.

I don't think any of these companies should have the right to farm out or make accessible any of our personal information without our permission. But this is a new area that needs to be monitored on the internet. The law is often a few years behind the advances made in cyberspace. So it pays to keep up with developing situations and information. Knowing what's going on and where you or your family may be vulnerable is important. Hoping this, the first of my 30 in 30 challenge was helpful to you. Please check back because I will be writing thirty hubs in 30 days from 8/1/10-8/31/10. My focus will be on informing you through quality writing and publishing. Dee