There are many dangers of using Facebook to individuals and businesses. These dangers are from low to very high severity. Find out the top dangers of Facebook below.
1. Account Hacking
Hackers are constantly stealing your Facebook account details. Researchers at an Internet security company VeriSign found out that a hacker was selling Facebook account username and passwords for as little as $25, and it was found that he had more than 1.5 million account details with him
There are more than 400 million Facebook accounts. If one hacker has 1.5 million account, imagine how many more hackers there are on earth and how many accounts have already been hacked and will be hacked in future by these hackers. The person who has your Facebook account can do anything to your account such as steal your personal information, information about your family for sending purposeful threats, publish unacceptable posts, harass your friends, and many other things like that.
2. Your Search on Facebook is Not Safe
Everything we search on the Facebook site with the new Open Graph feature is shared with third parties. Your search keywords are shared with other companies, so that they will know what people is looking for, what are your interests etc.
3. People with Fake Profiles
There are people who have fake profiles and their purpose is to harass someone, or to find out something about a specific person or to spy on you, or some other thing like that.
These people may have a profile picture of your friend or something that is very catchy. They have these so that the other person may easily accept their friend request and later they can easily see what they have been up to, spy on them and be successful in their evil mission.
4. Your Facebook Privacy Settings Get Reset
Every year, Facebook redesigns their Facebook functionality a few times. And every time they do this, your Privacy settings go back to Default, and you won’t know when this happens. So, all your information is made public, you become easily searchable, so your privacy is not protected anymore, unless you do all the Privacy settings again in your Facebook account.
5. 419 Scam
There has been a scam called the 419 Scam. In this, a hacker would hack your Facebook friend’s account and then from his account he will message you saying things like “Hey, I am in trouble, I have been looted on gun point on the road and I need money, please send 100$ to me urgently.
If you have a business and run a Business page on Facebook and one of your employees is hacked, you can imagine how much harm the hacker can cause to your business, for posting/commenting things that are bad for your business.
6. Downloading Malware Unknowingly
You know when you are browsing through your Facebook timeline, some ads are displayed at right. There are thousands of advertisers and Facebook can not really know which ad is legitimate and safe. There have been many ads which when people clicked asked them to download a latest and very efficient antivirus. And when you download it, you are actually downloading a virus instead.
These were top dangers of using Facebook. More recommended readings are listed below:
