Knowing Is Half The Battle

Social network sites are instrumental advertising tools for companies and individuals. They can also be your worst nightmare.

Sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and Utterz can boost site traffic overnight, which in turn, may mean more customers for your business or more readers for your web site. But, are you or your children giving out too much information online?

As you ‘tweet’ on Twitter or share your location on Brightkite, who is watching? Not just your ‘friends’ that’s for sure.

Are you heeding the same warnings you impose on teens on MySpace or Facebook? Pownce, Twitter and other social media like it, can be used by shady individuals for no good.

For example: You sign into a service like Brightkite and mark your location: “John Doe checked in at: Boston, MA, 02108, US - 2 minutes ago - via web.”

Then you send out a ‘tweet’ on Twitter to all your followers: “@all: I am currently at Borders at Downtown Crossing.”

Then you shoot over a photo of yourself inside Borders shopping for books.

Not too revealing right? Wrong. By performing the steps above, you have just provided a considerable amount of information.

• Location - You have just announced you are not at home and gave anyone within distance a way to contact you at your current location.
• Photo - You just shot off a photo of yourself to all of your followers so it won’t be hard to pick you out of the crowd because they now know what you’re wearing.
• Vulnerability - If you have ever made such a post while at school or work, anyone reading your messages informs readers how far you are from your school, job or home - leaving those locations vulnerable for 1- robbery, 2- a place to stalk you and 3- you just let everyone on the net know you are out alone.

Suddenly those posts are not so innocent are they?

MySpace has received much unwanted attention for instances just like these. Minors tell everything from where they live to where they got to school, work and what time they will be in their local mall.

Adults on Facebook or Linked In give their first and last names, their city, age, name of their company and even cell phone numbers.

When does networking cross the line into working against you?

Related info:

• Thief Hires Decoys on Craigslist
• 8 Teens Invite Girl Over, Beat Her Up & Post It On YouTube
• MySpace Prank Leads to Teen Suicide

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