5 Things You Should Be Careful About When Using Facebook!

5 Things You Should Be Careful About When Using Facebook!

Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, was launched a mere 6 years ago in United States of America by a group of Harvard students and until early 2006, this social network was virtually unknown in Pakistan. Pakistani nation was glued to other social networks including Orkut and Hi5 but there was not Facebook. The world’s biggest social network Facebook started gaining a slow but firm momentum from late 2006 and since then it has added more than 2 Million users! Pakistan is also 41st biggest user of Facebook! According to some statistics Pakistani youth (age 18 to 24) is the biggest user base of this giant social network.

It is also worth mentioning that Pakistani Facebook user base is growing at an average rate of 20 – 35% and this is despite of the fact that Facebook was banned by Pakistani government last month and this social network’s popularity has decreased. So it can be safely assumed that in next 10 to 15 years more than 90% of online Pakistan in general and Pakistani youth in particular would have their presence on Facebook.

So here are 5 simple things you should be careful about when using Facebook!

Be Careful About What You Post
We all post all sorts of stuff on Facebook. It could be a simple Facebook profile status, a web link, a photo, a video or even comments of other people’s posts! You should always keep one thing in mind that whatever you posted or have uploaded on Facebook is NOT PRIVATE. People, especially youngsters, post (comments and pictures including) many “objectionable material” on Facebook which can be pulled out many years later.

Be Careful When Adding Friends
The main purpose of any social network is to have a social interaction and a major part of this interaction may result in you adding different people as friends. You should be very careful when adding someone as a friend because you never know that the person you are adding might have “bad intentions” or might want to add you as a friend so that he/she may gain access to your information which can later be used in many ways.

Be Careful About Using Applications on Facebook
Facebook has hundreds of thousands of applications and millions of application users. These applications, or apps, range from simple “social interview” to highly enticing games. Almost all of these apps on Facebook require you to grant them “extended access” to your Facebook profiles and once you grant them the required access, these apps can access all of your data even including your “protected” data. There have been few cases registered in which hackers have gained access to profiles (later hacking some of the profiles) through such applications. It is also worth mentioning that most of the Facebook applications are not even developed by the Facebook! So if you fall into any of such scams, there is no way out!

Be Careful About Joining Facebook Groups & Before You “Like” Or Even Reporting A Fan Page
Yes, this is actually very serious! You should be very careful about what groups you join on Facebook! This may sound being very “hyper sensitive” about your FB profile but there have been many cases in which people have been fired from their jobs just because they had joined “objectionable” groups on Facebook. There are reports of Australian visa being refused to a Pakistani student just because he had created a fan page named “Al-Qaeda” (fan page was later removed). That student must have though that he lived in a “free world” where he could just say “anything about anything” but he forgot that the freedom of expression is still not fully free.

I am sure that you must know someone whose Facebook account was deleted by Facebook team just because he/she had been posting excessive material against a particular religion. You should avoid posting “offensive” or “sensitive” material. I know many cases in which people got their Facebook accounts deleted by the Facebook just because they had reported many anti-Islamic fan pages. If you have any report to make against any fan page, report it once or twice (max) and add a description as to why are you reporting against fan page. DO NOT keep on reporting against one single page as this could get your account blocked or deleted.

Be Careful About Sharing Your Information On Facebook
Okay, we understand that you need to be on the Facebook to stay connected with your peers, friends and family. And yes, we know that deleting your Facebook account in order to safeguard your web profile is not a good solution. So the best known solution of staying connected through Facebook and not having your information leaked to unwanted people is to have your Facebook privacy settings in placed. You think this is a lame solution? We agree. This is not so cool sci-fi way of solving the privacy issue but unfortunately there is no alternative! If you want to keep your FB profile up then you got to resort to Facebook’s private setting! Facebook offers your highly customizable privacy setting which can be separately applied to many components.

Remember: You must not allow the “strangers” to view your private photos, your phone numbers, your address etc. And DO NOT share your login and password with anybody!