Week-11 Blog

7 Ways to Avoid Identity Theft Before Facebook Gets Hacked
 

This article “7 ways to avoid identity theft before Facebook get hacked” by Adam Levin, talks about the ways you can protect yourself from being hacked or lose your valuable information from Facebook.  The article starts with a statement from Mark Zuckerberg who stated that “the age of privacy is over” and I think he meant it. There is no more privacy in Facebook and people don’t care it as long as they are updated with the information from family and friends. The article also states that Facebook is built to get personal information from users to better sell ads which are another truth about Facebook since billions of people spent so much time on it.   It is always good to be part of group and get lost of birthday wishes. That is why people put their birth day in Facebook and don’t realize that it could lead to identity theft and security breach. The last you want to know is your information is on a wrong hand for a wrong purpose.

For all these risk associated with using Facebook, the author mentioned several ways to avoid identity theft before your Facebook account gets hacked. He also states that having several Facebook account could help protect identity theft by confusing the hackers with pieces of information here and there. According to him, if you don’t want to have several accounts to protect yourself from hacking, here are some steps that could help:

1.       Having a different name in Facebook could help a big deal. Just tweaking the name a little might confuse the hacker to know who you are.

2.       Another important step you can take to protect yourself is to not tag your picture with location on it. So turning off the location services on the phone will stop hackers find out where you live or where you at.

3.       You don’t have to put your real age in Facebook. The least you could do is not include the birth year.

4.       Never store your credit card information in Facebook.   

5.       Have some boundaries before posting any information in Facebook. Set your privacy controls so that only the people you intend to share can view your postings.

6.       The less you post, the more peace of mind for you. Bragging stuffs in Facebook might only help bring you to the hacker’s attention.

7.       The last thing you could do to protect yourself with all the hassle s to deactivate your account.

I totally agree with the author's viewpoint in this article. It’s up to the users to activate or deactivate their Facebook account but it’s really necessary for them to think before posting anything in Facebook which might lead to having personal information stolen and used for something you don’t want to happen.

References:

Levin, A. (2013, Feb 7). 7 Ways to Avoid Identity Theft Before Facebook Gets Hacked. Retrieved May 22, 2015 from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-levin/7-ways-to-avoid-identity_b_2634967.html