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Be friendly but use your brain while talking on Social networking sites

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lets be frdHi friends, If you are using internet then you must be having accounts on Facebook or Orkut or Myspace etc. (may be in all :)) My question is: Why you joined social networking sites?

1. Just for fun,

2. To remain in touch with my friends and relatives,

3. To make new friends specially beautiful girls :D,

4. To remain updated about others

Let me guess in most cases it would case no. 2 or 3 (correct me if I am wrong). As far as you are safe at this site its ok even if you are addicted to it. But if you are sharing your social or personal information then be aware before talking even.
Bit Defender did survey on it and found more than 90% internet users share sensitive data within 2 hours of continuous talks over chat messenger or over Social sites.  According to Internet World Stats, people are spending increasingly more time online, with global Internet usage up by more than 390% between 2000 and 2009. Over this period of time, the popularity of social networks amplified as well.

They did survey by making a fake profile and sending friend request to more than 2000 users (male and female included age varying from 20-65 of 27 years mean age). After a week, the friendship request form proved very successful: out of the 2,000 requests sent by the test-profile, 1,872 were accepted.

A first analysis of the gathered datasets revealed that usually, on a social network, the first impression counts a lot: a very nice looking young woman will always attract a lot of friends. 94% of the 2,000-user experimental sample accepted to become friends with the test-profile.
Surprisingly 86% of them were from IT field (isn’t it hilarious), and more interesting ,31 % of them were from IT Security field. An industry that has been stressing the risks of using social networking sites for many years. (This really surprised me) Most of them added because of display picture which was of a lovely girl.

The worst thing with social networking site is, after having half an hour conversation with stranger they reveal many personal information like their parent’s names, address, spouse, children names (all these information can be use to crack passwords and in most of the cases it works).

They allow them to see their albums which may be copied for wrong purpose. In addition to that, after a 2 hour conversation, 73% revealed what appears to be confidential information from their work place, such as future strategies, plans, and unreleased technologies/software. The results of this study suggest not only that social network users accept unknown persons in their group just based on a nice profile photo, but also that they are willing to reveal personal, sensitive information after a short online conversation.

This means that social networks serve both as a meeting ground where people can present themselves and communicate, but also as a starting point for a virtual “friendship”, which brings people to divulge too much information because of the illusion of anonymity.
So, from the next time if someone sends you friend request or trying to talk to you over chat messenger, have patience do all investigations related to unknown profile (at least take help from Google) , if you feel O.K. then go on else reject it blindly. Never be too emotional over social sites and don’t reveal such things so easily. It may help them in social engineering and they may harm your system, your bank accounts, your reputation even you. See the images below for detailed analysis: frdship rateppl from diff jobpersonal info revealed Source: BitDefender

13 Comments

  1. I have lots of instances and have read in news paper, go news in media too. So thought to share this with everyone. And in most case, you will find it correct.

  2. woww……that was great to read, excellent article, from where did you get the graphs ?

    you are talking about test profiles, I always knew about it even all these sites esp orkut they had their own users who used to trap people.

    the best is when you said never be too emotional on the net very true….people can betray you if carry such heavy emotions and pour everything out, we have to learn to be smart and clever and we should know where to draw a line ….

    thanks for sharing .loved this article.

  3. Thanks Bhavna for your support and praiseworthy comment.

    Graphs are totally true. and Whatever is explained there is based fully on my personal experience and withing this 6 years I have faced many issues, challenges related to these stuffs so I know what emotions means to others, what loyalty and for what purpose most of the people use these websites.

    There are very less people who wish to help others or share their knowledge to make others more knowledgeable. Even they don't know that sharing means learning at faster scale within short span of time. đŸ™‚

     

     

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