Find out how easy it is to gain private information

Would you hand out your private information, your name, house address, work and home phone number, email address, birth date etc to strangers? I would hope not. But wait a minute, you probably have. Dozens of people you hardly know, some maybe even not at all, may have access to all of your private information right now! Facebook is the world’s largest online social network, trumping even that of myspace and through this service you may be putting your self at risk.

It is so easy to gain people’s private information, and I am going to show you a little trick you can do to see just how easy it is.

How many friends do you have on facebook?

The average facebook users would proudly claim two, three even four hundred friends. Some even boast a thousand, or thousands. Now you may not be in that sub group with a ridiculous number of facebook friends, but in all honesty, ask yourself how many facebook friends you actually have. More importantly, how many of them do you actually know. Many of them, that information ends with the ability to spell their names. All these people have access to your personal information. Now you may not think that that is a big deal, but you surely wouldn’t hand out that kind of information to people on the street. So why should facebook be any different?

So, why do you have so many friends on facebook?

For one, facebook has no line between personal friends, business parents, friends from school, family, acquaintances, ex-girlfriends and boyfriends. They’re all thrown in the same pot. They all have access to your information. You may want your closes friends to know you just moved to your new appartment at such and such street, but do you want people you met once and will never see again to know? Most likely not.

Another reason is that many promoters are constantly trying to add friends. And many people want to see how many friends they can have, so they constantly add more people to see how many friends they can have.

Lastly, some people don’t have many friends and because of these they try to meet new people online and will go as far as accepting complete strangers.

Here is a trick to see just how many people will add a stranger

Step 1

Create a new facebook user with a cute or fluffy character and name it accordingly. Then send random invites to as many people as you want. Keep track of the number or use a simple one to remember such as 10, 20 or 100 invites. Then see how many people will add you on the spot. (It should be around 20%)

Step 2

Not everyone will fall for this, so now add this to your status: “Just got a new facebook and deleted my old, please re-add me.”

Step 3

Watch how many unsuspecting victims will give you access to their private and personal data. Make sure you comment with your results so people can learn from them.

How can you fix this

For one, don’t add random strangers as your friend. You never know who someone could be, especially cute furry creatures. Another thing to do is to continually purge your facebook friends list. People may be friends with you for a while and then you realize that you haven’t seen them in ages and don’t plan on it, or maybe you added them thinking they would be a friend and it ended up not being so. Why keep them as friends? You should delete anyone that you don’t want to have access to your personal information.

Secondly, go to facebook settings > search and reduce your facebook search features. You should give non friends as little information about you as possible.

Like I said, make sure you comment and tell us how the experiment went.