Facebook and Identity

Almost every one now a days is aware about the practice of identity theft which is affecting not thousands in fact millions of people around the globe.

And the consequences that people face after losing their identity to hackers are even worse. This rise in identity theft is not because of any single issue, instead is due to mixture of various reasons.

Facebook Identity Theft

1) People are barely aware of the fact that they need to keep their certain objects as a secret and avoid them exposing online.

2) Also masses mostly feel comfortable relying and trusting on social network sites like Facebook.

3) Requirement of public networks to produce profits through advertisement leads to relaxed privacy policies.

4) Which creates a deficiency of principles set for online privacy of a common man, and a need for developing a strong policy.

Even though many people at present might turn down the dangers, identity theft holds, but in future they are more likely to face this issue at much larger scale.

Modern marketing techniques are more focused towards customization instead of mass marketing, and Facebook serving this particular need very well. So marketers’ advertising is now more based on personal information. And in pursuit of high revenues social network sites are encouraging their users to provide more and more of their personal information. What we need is intervention of Government agencies to ensure the practices of advertising and social networking sites more secure, and more inducements for users to acquire education about online safety. Now many online sites and search engines are building advertisement algorithms in line with the public interest. This will not only benefit the advertiser, also it will increase traffic of websites as more users would want to log on sites showing ads of public interests. But unfortunately in this win-win situation, the only party loosing might be public themselves. Seeing the other side of picture, these social networking sites have heaps of classified information about people, which makes them more susceptible to be attacked by hackers.

It is responsibility of social networking sites as well to keep secret of their users as secrets and not expose it to everyone.  Despite the fact that every person identifies the elements – Full name, date of birth, pet names, and hobbies – they should by no means disclose to social networking sites Facebook, but many social networking sites ask for them, and people willingly share the information. And such raw information might seems to be useless but hackers can utilize your middle name, pet names and hobbies to hack your ATMs, social networking accounts or Email accounts easily.

On many occasions it has been noticed that people are welcoming the burglars to their houses them self. With tremendous use of social networking sites like Facebook all over the world, stalkers are aware of your each single activity you make. People very regularly update their online status on Facebook and Twitter, enabling you to become target. A person going on a family trip for a week may quite happily updates his status regarding his trip, but he has no idea that he is making his alone house behind vulnerable for theft activity.

As it moves toward pursuing to steal an online identity; usage of picture and video-sharing sites make every deep detail about you, your relatives, acquaintances, and your center of significance and sideline activities available online for everybody to see.