Introduction to Cyber Security

Posting Personal Details

Social networking sites ask you for a good deal of data about yourself to make it easier for other users to find and connect to you. Perhaps the biggest vulnerability this creates for users of these sites is the possibility of identity fraud, which is increasingly common. In addition, the more information about yourself you reveal online, the easier it becomes for the authorities to identify you and monitor your activities. The online activities of diaspora activists from some countries have led to the targeting of their family members by the authorities in their homelands.
Ask yourself: is it necessary to post the following information online?

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  birth dates
  
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  contact phone numbers
  
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  addresses
  
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  details of family members
  
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  sexual orientation
  
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  education and employment history
  

3. Friends, Followers and Contacts

The first thing you will do after filling in your personal details with any social networking application is establish connections to other people. Presumably these contacts are people you know and trust – but you may also be connecting to an online community of like-minded individuals that you have never met. The most important thing to understand is what information you are allowing this online community to have.
When using a social network account such as Facebook, where a lot of information about yourself is held, consider only connecting to people you know and trust not to misuse the information you post.

4. Status Updates

On Twitter and Facebook and similar networks, the status update answers the questions: What am I doing right now? What's happening? The most important thing to understand about the status update is who can actually see it. The default setting for the status update on most social networking applications is that anyone on the internet can see it. If you only want your contacts to see the updates, you need to tell the social networking application to keep your updates hidden from everyone else.
To do this in Twitter, look for “Protect Your Tweets”. In Facebook, change your settings to share your updates with “Friends Only”. Even if you switch to those settings, consider how easy it is for your information to be reposted by followers and friends. Agree with your network of friends on a common approach to passing on the information posted in your social networking accounts. You should also think about what you may be revealing about your friends that they may not want other people to know; it's important to be sensitive about this, and to ask others to be sensitive about what they reveal about you.
There have been many incidents in which information included in status updates has been used against people. Teachers in the US have been fired after posting updates about how they felt about their students; other employees have lost their jobs for posting about their employers. This is something that nearly everyone needs to be careful about.

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