PC Magazine - 2009 04.pdf - Libertad Zero - Blog

a risk. Those two are natural enemies, like
eggs and bowling balls. Facebook is simply
not designed as a tool for business. If you
feel that you have no choice but to dillydally
on Facebook, consider these facts:
• Facebook was designed by adolescents,
for adolescents with adolescent
goals in mind. Only a few years ago, a
.edu e-mail address was a prerequisite to
a Facebook account, a requirement that
effectively limited membership to college
students. That sensibility remains part of
Facebook’s DNA. A site designed to help
you publish photos of yourself barfing over
a beer keg is unlikely to help burnish your
reputation in business.
• Facebook’s opaque user interface,
the result of its fundamentally collegiate,
video-gamer sensibility, is not designed
to be an effective business tool. Mistakes
are far easier to make and harder to correct
than you’d expect in an application
designed for actual work.
• You can’t predict or control who will
ask to “friend” you on Facebook. What do
you do when your boss or an important client
asks to become your Facebook friend?
If your Facebook page includes the names
of everyone in your witches’ coven, do you
want important potential clients to see
that? Or will you insult some bigwig by
refusing a friend request? It’s not exactly
the dilemma of the ages, but it’s certainly a
potential social headache that adults need
to consider when joining Facebook.
• Facebook developers often spring new
features on users without warning. Not
long ago a new “beacon” feature tracked
members’ online shopping transactions
and broadcast details to the world. The
feature was dialed back after a firestorm
of protest as well as some huge lawsuits
over privacy violations, but the impulsive
sensibility of Facebook developers augurs
similar surprises in the future. And it raises
the creepy question of why Facebook is collecting
that information in the first place.
• Facebook phishing is beginning to
surface. In one scenario, scammers hijack
the Facebook log-in of a friend of yours and
then pretend to be that friend with an urgent
need for money. They contact you via chat
and start the scam from there. To you, it
looks like a request from a person you actually
know, often embellished with personal
information gleaned from your own Facebook
entries. If anyone asks you for money
on Facebook, use your head—don’t do it. At
the very least, insist on direct contact in
solutions social networking
pitfalls of finding friends You can easily find out who on your contact lists
are on Facebook. Think twice before adding business contacts to your network.
person or via a phone call that you originate.
You need to be sure that you’re dealing
with a moocher you actually know, not
some unknown scammer. You should also
contact the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint
Center, at www.ic3.gov, to file a complaint.
In some other cases, a phony Facebook
friend invites you to view a video that
requires you to download a player. Naturally,
that player is infected with malware.
Obviously, this same scam could be delivered
by e-mail or ordinary Web surfing, but
the familiarity of relationships on Facebook
induces people to lower their guard.
Don’t despair. You can maintain a reasonable
level of safety on Facebook. A few
common-sense precautions can reduce
your risk of problems. For starters, look
over your privacy settings by selecting Privacy
Settings from the Settings drop-down
menu in the upper right-hand corner of the
screen. You can adjust every detail of your
privacy settings, including who can see
pictures, postings, personal information,
and work information. You can also adjust
what individual members see, so your boss
or ex-spouse might not see things that the
rest of the world does. There’s some wisdom
in allowing only people you actually
know to view your profile.
One part of the “Find Friends” feature
is a service that asks for the log-in and
password of an online e-mail account such
as Gmail or Yahoo; it pulls the account’s
address book information into Facebook.
Good sense says that you shouldn’t pull a
list of business contacts into Facebook if
you think there’s a risk of embarrassment.
You might also consider who’s allowed
to see photos that other people have tagged
with your name. You may not want certain
photos to be seen by certain people. It’s
also possible for people to tag photos with
your name that aren’t actually you, so it’s
probably best to set your privacy level to
limit tagged photo viewing to your friends,
not the whole network.
Let’s face it, Facebook is a time sink.
Be prepared to spend an hour or so setting
up your account when you first join.
It doesn’t take that long to get an account
established, but it does take some time to
configure your account to make it suitable
for use by a grown-up.
A bit of social engineering can also help
you distinguish business contacts from
social friends. If an important business client
wants to “friend” you, suggest that you
connect on LinkedIn or one of the business
networking services instead. That way you
don’t have to insult someone by refusing
to be a friend, and you can position your
relationship as something more important
than a casual encounter on Facebook.
APRIL 2009 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 41