I know most of you people are in Facebook. Always making status updates, liking other’s updates, commenting on them, posting over somebody else’s wall, chatting with friends, playing online games etc.
There are a lot of other web services too who enable you to access them once you link your Facebook account.
Let me ask you one question, how many of you can surely say that your Facebook account is completely secure? I’m sure that there are a lot of people who’ve never thought about it, until my last post about making passwords secure. If you missed it, here it is.
Facebook has got security issues since long. One of my friends, who happens to be a online security expert was saying that a hacker can easily crack facebook’s safety measures if he applied right strategy.
Well nothing to worry about, there are many ways to prevent these attacks to some extent.
Controlling What Others See
Most of you people must have come to Facebook after getting bored with orkut right? You’ll be real experts over there and must not knowing how this Facebook works.
The very best thing you can do to prevent your information from going to wrong hands is actually the very basic thing you can do, never add any unknown person as a friend, if you want to, then ask your friends who happen to be a mutual friend of you and that person. If there are no mutual friends, just message them asking who they are and decide after their reply.
Controlling the information about you which are accessible to friends and also others is really important. If your data, including your full profile, photos, contact details are available to the persons looking for your details even if you are not in their friends list, how’ll that be? It’ll be handing your details to them in silver platter.
For controlling what information to share with your friends and also with others including friends of friends and strangers, what you can do is to customize the privacy settings accordingly. Go to the privacy setting page,
Privacy Setting Page - Click To Enlarge
Select the option “customize settings” and make changes according to your need. For controlling basic information which your friends will use to find you, you can go to the basic settings page and make changes accordingly.
Custom Settings - Click To Enlarge
Never share details like email, phone number, IM screen names, addresses and other sensitive data with those who are outside friends circle. Those people outside your friends and all need not be shown more details than your profile picture, name and basic info which you only will be typing down.
Making Albums Secure
Well most of you will be having a lot of pictures of you and your friends in your albums, in the privacy setting option itself, you’ll be finding option for controlling visibility of those albums to your contacts and others in Facebook. Make them visible only to your friends and that will be better. A general tip of advice for girls, it’s not safe to put your pictures in Facebook. Normally your friends list will be hell lot bigger than that of boys and in that you’ll not know half of them properly. For preventing this unwanted use of your pictures, you can restrict yourself from posting pictures to some extent and also by not adding unknown people too.
Cool Apps Are Not So Cool
You all must have tried out 3rd party apps in Facebook which are related to anything and everything right? Well what I gotta tell you is that it’s not at all safe. First thing is that they prompt you to switch back to the http more which is very much vulnerable than the https browsing. Most of these apps request your access to your personal details, for posting on your wall and like that. Accessing means also to collect your data and save them somewhere convenient too. Many similar incidents have been reported before also, so make sure that you never grant to apps which never appear genuine.
For monitoring your information which is available for apps, you can go to the apps setting tab and make changes accordingly. That way you can remove the unwanted apps that you have used before and control information which is shared with them.
Hope that with all this, you know how to make your Facebook account more secure than it is at the present. More to come in this TBSN series and will get back to you with the next article soon. Happy Facebooking… 
SoorajKeshav/-
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