How to Avoid the Dangers of Facebook
In the Dangers of using Facebook article, I explained the top 6 dangers of using the world’s most heavily used social networking site – Facebook. If you are a Facebook user, you should be aware of these dangers, and now let’s look at 10 ways to avoid the dangers of Facebook.
1. Don’t Share Anything with Non-Friends
Make sure not to allow those who are not in your network of Facebook fiends to see your Facebook Profile, your Facebook About page, your Friends list and your timeline.
It is especially important not to allow non-friends to see your Friends list because someone can easily impersonate any of your friends, by creating a fake profile having same name as your friend’s and same profile picture. The evil-doer will then send you a friend request. You will accept it thinking it is a genuine friend request. Now, he is in, and can see all your information including your timeline, your personal information, your statuses, your travel details, and much more.
2. Don’t Share Everything with Every Friend Either
Don’t fully trust all your friends either. All friends are not always the same. Your friend who has most of your secrets can become your worst enemy if situation between you two changes. Therefore, have boundaries.
To achieve this, don’t post your correct date of birth, or at least don’t post all parts of your DoB (Year, Month, Day) correct. Don’t make all your posts visible to all your friends. Hide your statuses about traveling, office, home, etc from friends who you think could be jealous, or could be threat to you in any stage of your life. Remember, the more you reveal what you are doing, where you are, the spies, the identity thieves, the evil-doers will immediately take notice.
3. Protect Your Credit/Debit Cards
Think twice before uploading your credit card information on Facebook for payment of services like Facebook Ads, etc. Delete the card info from the site, if you are no longer advertising.
4. Don’t Post Location of Your Whereabouts
Avoid posting locations where pictures were taken. Also don’t geotag your photos, which shows exact location.
5. Be Careful with Third Party Applications
Don’t trust all Facebook applications or games, whether on a desktop PC or in your Android or iOS phone. Many a times, when you download an app, it asks your permission to read your Facebook profile, or your personal information on Facebook. Most of us are in habit of clicking the ‘Accept’ button immediately, without reading the permission detail. Any app that doesn’t require any login before you can use it, or any app that has nothing to do with account creation or Facebook shouldn’t be asking for a Facebook permission.
So, always be careful with this. Whenever you are promoted to accept the permission for using the app, make sure you understand the use of app and read the permissions properly. Do not accept the permissions if they look dodgy. Tons of evil apps are out there which steal your personal information from your computer or mobile phone and from your Facebook account or they do things on Facebook in your name because you allowed the app to do so. So, always be very careful.
6. Strong Passwords
Create long and complex password and still change it at least once a month. Also, it is important now to use the same password on every different site i.e same password for Facebook, for your email account, etc.
7. Do not use public Wi-Fi.
8. Antivirus
Always make sure you have updated antivirus installed on your computer.
9. Web Browser
When your browser prompts to download any update, don’t ignore it, accept to download it immediately.
10. Be vigilant!
Hope you found this information useful and that now you can say that you are now aware of dangers of using Facebook and also how to be safe from these dangers 🙂
