There are many threats in modern day life, from credit card fraud to identity theft that we’ve all known about for a while. After all, we all have that uncle or aunt or relative or whatever that we know has lost money to these scams. But as we also know, social engineering is one of the most cunning ways to make money and easily too… after all, who doesn’t trust a face that strikes us as someone who seems innocent enough?

But as Sophos found, up to about 45% of all Facebook users aren’t watching who they’re adding to their accounts. Daisy, a ‘duck’, got added about 46 times out of 100 when “she” made the offer, while Dinette, the ‘cat lady’ would get 49 out of 100. And these are people that didn’t even realize who or what Sophos is. [Link to the study]

So this rises the question: what should we do to prevent this from happening to ourselves? Well, a good first step is to make your Facebook as private as possible. Believe me when I say this has now become extremely easy to do so and an extremely wise idea to boot.

For the completely unaware, when you hit the Account dropdown in the upper right corner of the screen, you have options to change your privacy there, under the self-explanatory Account tab. The problem is, even now as I said, many people just don’t understand the threats out there and why you should use the privacy setup. There have been people fired over Facebook statuses, SIN numbers guessed at (read the ones covering birth years, and you’ll see a fair number of nations do this, Canada too), as well as general privacy concerns.

Above is a GIF that has both the default settings and my personal settings on my account. As you can see, there’s a lot more that I’ve set myself to be exclusive to me only. “But Paul”, I can hear you shout, “what’s the harm? I’m not going to add anyone who isn’t a friend I know!” I made the same comment myself a while back, until I found out one of my friends who has a Facebook account has a very common name. And he also never had a photo of himself as the profile picture, so I couldn’t make it out if it was him or someone else. So I had to wait for him to add me because I didn’t want to be burned by a look-alike.

At the same time, you might not be aware on how much information you are leaking out. Which is where Reclaim Privacy comes in and lets you know. Simply enable your Bookmark Bar on any browser, drag the Bookmarklet to the toolbar, and run it the next time you’re on Facebook. Assuming that you’ve set everything as close as possible to the paranoid/secure side, you should receive a green bar letting you know you’re safe. If it’s Red or Yellow, you still have a bit of tweaking to do if you wish for more privacy. If it freezes, chances are good you’ve got the new interface, like I showed above, and can visually and easily see and adjust your Facebook settings without this Bookmarklet. I wish you all the best and safe browsing!

– Reclaim Privacy –