Words of Caution Concerning Social Networking Sites like Facebook & Twitter

There is a growing trend of applications (apps) to require your permission, ID and password to allow access to your social network sites like Facebook and Twitter, among others. If you use Facebook and some of the applications such as Farmville or the hundreds of others, they ask you for access to your Facebook page. While a few of these, if you are very certain that they are legitimate applications, may be fine to use, as you are sent more and more of these games or causes, ALWAYS BEWARE when they ask you for this access.

I, for one, choose to not use Facebook for purposes of games. I use it to connect and stay in touch with friends or associates who I haven't seen for years. I also use FB and others to promote and notify my readers when I have posted a new article that I've written.

Social networks are also great for marketing and promotion of a business and worthy cause promotion. Occasional worthy causes are seeing great potential to have many people become advocates for their cause, but even when you receive a message from a friend asking to support or donate to their cause, you may want to send them a private message, or even an email asking them if they actually sent it to you.

When people of all ages are rushing to see what these social networks are all about, they are jumping in without much knowledge about security. Most people will assume that if their friends are using it, it is perfectly safe, and they are, but everyone is ultimately responsible for their own security and privacy. Everyone must assume their own degree of caution in all things Internet.

Twitter is another social networking application that is also growing in popularity and there are so many third party applications that work with Twitter in so many ways. They will always ask you for your Twitter ID and password to cross access their app with your Twitter account. This is an automatic flag to you to wonder about the validity of the app, so again, ALWAYS make sure you feel safe with the application before you grant access.

Read more about this topic: Report: Bad guys go social; Facebook tops security risk list

Here is more about your privacy from Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation.php

From the US-CERT (U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team): http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/tips/ST06-003.html