America’s top Privacy & Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo has appeared on 60 Minutes, Anderson Cooper, Fox & in front of audiences including the Department of Defense, Pfizer, Homeland Security and hundreds of corporations and associations of all sizes. His high-content, humorous, audience-interactive style delivers all of the expertise with lots of entertainment. Come ready to laugh and learn about this mission-critical, bottom-line enhancing topic.
John Sileo is an award-winning author and keynote speaker on the dark art of deception (identity theft, fraud training, data privacy, social media manipulation) and its polar opposite, the powerful use of trust, to achieve success. He is CEO of The Sileo Group, which advises teams on how to multiply performance by building a culture of deep trust.
Why You Should Share Facebook Privacy Settings with Friends
A true friend does more than just post updates about their conquests on your wall. They share information with you that makes your life better, even if it isn’t exactly what you want to hear. And you do the same for them. But are your friends unwittingly sharing too much information about you with others (strangers, advertisers, app developers, scammers)? Probably. For example, if they (or you) haven’t customized your privacy settings lately, you are giving Facebook permission to:
Publish your name, photo, birth date, hometown and friend list to everyone?
Indirectly share your restricted data with outsiders through your friends?
Let your friends check you in to embarrassing locations where you aren’t?
Post your Likes as advertisements on friends’ walls using your name?
Authorize Google to index, access and share your information on the web?
A report was recently published claiming that nearly 100,000 Facebook apps have been leaking access codes belonging to millions of users’ profiles. Symantec released the report and said that an app security flaw may have given apps and other third parties access to users’ profiles. Facebook maintains that they have no evidence of this occurring.
In their report, Symantec wrote:
We estimate that as of April 2011, close to 100,000 applications were enabling this leakage. We estimate that over the years, hundreds of thousands of applications may have inadvertently leaked millions of access tokens to third parties.
These “access tokens” help apps interact with your profile.They are most often used to post updates from the application to your wall. When you add the applications to your profile you, as the Facebook user, is giving the apps access to your information by accepting their conditions. According to the investigation, these tokens were included in URLs sent to the application host and were then sent to advertisers and analytics platforms. If the recipient recognized the codes (meaning they have to be qualified to read and write HTML code), they could gain access to the user’s wall’s and profile.
Did you know that Facebook can use photos you post on the site in advertisements targeted on the right (advertising) side of your contact’s profile?
Unless you customize your privacy settings, Facebook can share just about anything you post with just about everyone. Using your intellectual property for their financial gain is not a new Facebook issue, but one that should be revisited due to recent Facebook Privacy changes. Here’s the funny part: you gave Facebook the right to use any of your content in any way they see fit when you signed up for your account and didn’t read the user agreement. If you visit the Facebook Statement of Rights page you will see the following:
You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:
Facebook has announced that they will be rolling out a new security feature that will add full HTTPS support to the site. The new secure site uses the same underlying technology that banks use to keep your communications out of the reach of potential hackers. While many people don’t have this feature yet and mine just showed up today, eventually all users should have the capability.
To enable HTTPS, log into your Facebook account and at the top right go into Account -> Account Settings.
Once there, scroll all the way to the bottom and click “change” next to Account Security.
The following screen should pop up. Check the box under Secure Browsing. You can also check “send me an email” (or a text message to your cell phone, which I don’t advise giving to Facebook) so that if someone tries to log into your account from a new computer, Facebook will immediately alert you. This is a good way to find out fast if your account has been hacked.
While Facebook privacy issues are becoming a concern for most users, you would think that the CEO of Facebook should at least be protected. Apparently that is not the case. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page was hacked last week. The founder of the social networking giant found himself to be a victim of what many users often face, and I hope it prompts him to incorporate more robust security into the fabric of Facebook. In fact, my experience is that people’s willingness to pay attention to privacy and data security goes up exponentially when they have experienced a breach first hand.
Here is what The Guardian had to say about Zuckerberg’s breach:
“Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page has been hacked by an unknown person who posted a status update suggesting that the site should let people invest in it rather than going to the banks. The page belonging to the 26-year-old Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder who was named Time‘s Man of the Year in 2010, was hacked some time on Tuesday.” (The Guardian)
Facebook is preparing to give away your phone number and address to app developers and advertisers.
The frog is officially beginning to boil. Just check out all of the articles swirling around on the internet about Facebook’s latest attempt to release more of your information without your consent. This time they want to give out your phone number and address. They were pretty clear that the reason they want this information is to pass it on to developers of apps such as Farmville and advertisers that want to bolster their profile on you. They released the post late Friday afternoon – so late in fact that many news outlets didn’t pick it up until Monday. Many are accusing Facebook of trying to bury the news.
With the meteoric rise in cyber-bullying, parents are desperate to find a way to shield their children. Unfortunately, most parents are far behind their child’s proficiency with technology. Many don’t text, aren’t on Facebook, and are oblivious to the many ways in which kids can taunt each other with technological ease. Although children may be quick and nimble with technology, they lack the maturity to understand its consequences.
A recent article in the New York Times on Digital Bullying (read the MSN version here) addressed these very issues and gave true and heart-wrenching accounts of how parents were left helpless at the hands of their children’s online bullies. “I’m not seeing signs that parents are getting more savvy with technology,” said Russell A. Sabella, former president of the American School Counselor Association. “They’re not taking the time and effort to educate themselves, and as a result, they’ve made it another responsibility for schools.”
According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, Facebook apps are sharing more about you than you think.
The Journal stated in their article, Facebook in Privacy Breach, that many of the most popular applications on the site are transmitting personal information about you and even your friends to third party advertisers and data companies. Apps such as BumperSticker, Marketplace, or Zynga’s Farmville (with over 50 million users) can be sharing your Facebook User ID with these companies. This can give as little information as your name, or as much as your entire Facebook Profile. In some cases, your data is being shared even if you have set your Facebook privacy settings to disallow this type of sharing.
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