by Samuel B. Hislop on May 5, 2010
Chances are that you are on Facebook. Or, if you’re not, you soon will be. After all, Facebook boasts over 400 million users across the world (Facebook Press Room) and is growing rapidly.
We all have our own reasons for joining—we want to connect with old friends, find new friends, or we give in to pressure from friends or family that are already there (Groundswell, 2008). However, too many of us join Facebook without giving much attention to our Facebook privacy settings.
A Consumer Reports survey, released yesterday, says that 52% of social network users posted “risky information” during the past year. Interestingly, the number was 56% among Facebook users. A New York Times analysis of this Consumer Reports survey says the report “inadvertently reveals that Facebook users clearly have no idea about how much they’re publicly sharing on the network.”
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by James Gunter on April 29, 2010
A friend of mine just sent me a link to a site that could be slightly scary for people who care about their privacy. The site is called, Spokeo. Spokeo bills itself as
a search engine specialized in organizing people-related information from phone books, social networks, marketing lists, business sites, and other public sources. Most of this data is publicly available on the Web.
What this means for you is that Spokeo is a place that makes it easy for anyone to find personal information about you on the web.
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by Samuel B. Hislop on April 23, 2010
You don’t have to live very long before you realize a grand truth: Success and safety often come from adherence to a few fundamental principles.
This truth also applies to how we conduct ourselves on the Internet. That’s why I was happy to come across a succinct list of Internet conduct DOs and DONT’s from Microsoft’s Online Safety Community. While the list has been up for a while and doesn’t mention anything new, great things would happen if more of us would follow its core principles.
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by George Feder on April 21, 2010
How do I define “Apathy”? As a former criminal, I describe apathy in this way: It’s a serious mental disease that almost all people have. Criminals love the fact that people have it and hope they never recover. This may not be the dictionary definition, but I’m telling you how it’s defined by criminals.
I simply can’t comprehend how anyone that claims to be a rational, intelligent, and loving individual cannot become pro-active when it comes to crime-prevention. Law enforcement statistics are readily available and quoted in all forms of media: TV, radio, internet, newspapers, and whatever else exists.
The following statement is a documented fact: A burglary and/or home invasion happens every 10 to 15 seconds in the U.S., 24 hours a day, and 365 days a year every year! With the odds stacked up against all of us, how is it possible that we all are not pro-active when it comes to protecting ourselves and our loved ones? The answer is simple; to my mind this analogy explains it all: Why do people who smoke cigarettes and cigars and those who choose to “chew” tobacco continue to do so, knowing all too well that indulging in that behavior causes cancer? The same mindset applies to apathy when related to crime-prevention.
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by James Gunter on April 15, 2010
Yesterday I was introduced to an internet browser created just for kids, Surf Knight. I’ve seen similar products from time to time and I’m not quite sure what to think about them. On the one hand, I can image great benefit for parents and children with a web browser that is specifically engineered for child use and parental monitoring. For example, Surf Knight lets parents control which websites a child is able to access and it provides filtering for pornographic websites, if your child is doing internet searches.
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