How others steals your Facebook info?

Part 3 of this series gets into another peril of social networking. Whilst the first 2 parts dealt with friend requests (from the outside), you’ll also need to deal with the existing friends (on the inside).
By now, if have collected alot of friends and you thought, “this is cool. The net is about sharing, I share my info, and my friends so the same, we get to be in touch and know what’s happening with everyone including birthdays, email address or mobile phone numbers”. Right, you have probably entered most of the interesting info including that time you kissed your best friend’s girlfriend in the Favorite TV show column. But what do you know about the data that’s being stored?
Here’s some other exploits you should know:
Your friend Brian has just downloaded the Facebook application FriendCSV and extracted your name, education history, work history, birthday amongst other infointo a CSV file that he can put into Excel or email to anyone he chooses in the world.
Your friend Mary just joined a web site called Plaxo. They had a new app called pulse which goes in to Facebook, looks up every one of your friends, and pulls down their contact information.
Your friend’s uncle Johnny became your friend recently because you couldn’t say no to his request, and he downloaded another application off the net called fbCal.com which extracts all the birthdays to his computer so that he can remember it easily. Or is he using it for some banking transactions that requires verification over the phone which the birthday may come in handy?
Surely you don’t want to felt victim of identity theft, but the information you provided to share on facebook or any other social netowkring web site may already have provided enough details. All it takes is for someone to have access to it. Previously it’s not an easy task to get all the information together, but slowly there’re tools built for the purpose of massive extraction.

How do you deal with this?
1. The most obvious thing is to enter as little information about you as possible. Providing information such as your birthday may seem to be innocent at first. But soon, you’ll find that this information are often used for bank verification purposes. By default, facebook displays your entire birthday including the year. At a minimum, set your birthday to only display the day and the month only.

2. Click on Privacy > Profile > Contact Information. Here the default is that friends can see your mobile phone number for example. The most approrpiate thing to do here is to set this to “No One”. No one should get access to your phone number. Again this is a very useful for banking verification. To avoid identity theft, do this!!!

Also try to limit your announcements, if you publicly tell people that you will be out of town for a vacation or your plans to attend a concert ahead of schedule, criminals can use this information to determine when your home may be empty for burglary.

As much security as Facebook has in place, all users should be aware of the details they disclose to others, some of which are real friends, others are not.