Agora Media Group Innovation Blog

At least a dozen questions have been raised in the past months, about the threats and unsafe environment prevailing in social networking sites. Social networking services offers a chance to build the relationship between people having similar interests by forming a online community. But these are no exceptions for fraudsters and hackers who takes advantage of people using fake identities. Some of the famous social networking sites include facebook, bebo, twitter, technorati etc.,

Threats and Frauds:

According to a recent survey, increase in the broadband plans has increased the amount of Internet users. Also the Internet era has taken us way beyond than how we actually wanted to communicate. Emails, chat, online communities, file sharing, etc., plays a vital role both in business and personal lives. But online security has always been a question to the users since the birth of Internet. Fraudsters work faster than ethical technology aspirants to find the loop and to break the privacy of the users. Social networking sites benefits most of the users in exploring people of their interest and share their views. It also helps people to think beyond barriers like country, religion, education and other qualifications. But tracking the identity of the partners is definitely a tough task. Not more than 10% of the users would be techie enough to find who his/her partners really are? Fraudsters creates a fake profile and exhibits false information of name, place, age, gender, status and much more and make other innocent users especially children as their victims.

Security measures:

Internet packages like mobile broadband and other wireless services has given more opportunity for teens and children to communicate in private, which can back fire if they are not smart enough to identify other users intention. These issues have been reported to the people managing the social networking sites. They have been insisted to come up with better tracking system to identify fake profiles created with the intention of spam marketing and other online frauds. Also to help protect children if they fear some ones intention, Bebo has initiated a child help button which will be redirected to get a local police officers help in case of any abuse or fear. Moreover companies are also insisted to increase the privacy settings and also provide child locking in these sites.

Secure yourself and your children:

All users are strongly recommended to sign up any social networking site only after knowing the use of the site and reading the terms and conditions. Its important that parents monitor the usage of the Internet periodically. Its important that we educate the children in using the social networking sites and let them know the level of safety available in these kind of networks. Sharing of photographs should be limited only to well know users. Other private information and financial identities should be strictly avoided. Despite of the government and broadband providers efforts to avoid Cyber crime, users should update themselves with all security essentials.

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This article is a guest post by Broadbandsuppliers.co.uk and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Agora Media Group editorial staff.
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