With over 500 million users, Facebook is the biggest online community. Especially young people have the motto "if you are not in FB you are out".
But with facebook are coming new problems and transparency we might not want.
Below the most important things you should NOT do in Facebook or at least not have shown to others than friends.
Birthday and birth city
Telling everybody birthday, year and city where you live, is almost as critical to give the social security away. With a little knowledge how the SSN is generated, people can use this to figure your SSN out to use it for false credits etc. Just bing for "ssn generator" and you will find tons of web pages.
Full address
Obviously having the privacy setting wrong and your address in Facebook will allow criminals not only to find out where you live but as well how well. Putting this address into google maps and using street view gives a good indication about your house. We are aware of this but still 40% of Facebook users have their address in Facebook and 65% of them public.
Vacations
You might be excited to go on vacations, but announcing it in Facebook or Twitter is very stupid. It is like announcing everybody that your house is empty the next two weeks.
Confessions and complains
Confessions are belonging into the church or courthouse but not in Facebook.
A waitress in Michigan got fired because she complained about her boss and co-workers in facebook. A fast food chain employee got fired after he confessed that he and his coworkers are not wearing gloves when preparing food.
Already 8% of companies did fire somebody because of wrong use of a social network, even if online social networking pretty young.
Too much information (TMI)
Most websites with password protection will ask an user a security in case user did forget password.
These questions are almost every time the same. What is your mothers maiden name? What is your favorite movie? What is your cats name? Etc.
You make it easy for people to answer these questions, If you have such info on your Facebook page.
Risk information
If you smoke 2 packages of cigarettes a day, don't post about this, your health care company will use it against you.
Don't write about all your small accidents you had with your moms car, the insurance will charge you more.
Insurances are scouting social networks for all these information to either charge you more for your insurance or to sue you later that you did not disclose this info to them from the beginning.
Games and during work hours posts
As much fun games are and as much you like to tweet or post your thoughts to Facebook or Twitter don't do it during your work hours.
Even if you use your private phone and not your company computer, your boss can see the time stamps of all your entries on your wall and can easily figure out how much time you spend in facebook during work.
Off time locations
Don't use your cell phone at all when you took a day off because you felt sick, or because you had to go to your grand uncle funeral. It looks pretty bad when you post your location with places or foursquare to you Facebook account, which shows your location in a nice nightclub in the other side of town than the location you supposed to be.
- Posted using My iPad
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