Mobile phones are personal gadgets, you tend to carry it around with you almost all the time and being within arm’s reach at all times, and it is easy to start feeling that the device is an extension of one’s self.
In many ways, that is what a mobile phone is, but when you consider that the handset is also the perfect portable doorway to the internet, then it is as much as part of the human body as a street post or a mailbox –it is not.
The web, as much as we hate paranoia, is really out to get you. A little bit of carelessness is enough to have an email address killed by the sheer volume of spam that can be received. If you think that all that talk about scam emails from Nigeria or Africa are a bunch of jokes, they are actually true and many people are losing thousands of Pounds worth of money to these scams.
And email is not the only thing that is being plagued on the internet; social networking sites are the perfect place for data mining and information gathering. If the previous fuss about Facebook doing some internal data mining for its own was not enough of an issue, then it should be remembered that your friends and contacts are most likely able to see anything that you post or say –and naturally, everything written in the information page.
Some useful tips when it comes to social networking include changing your name and details with fake information. Another is to filter, sort and even delete friends as needed (seriously, do you need to be connected to that guy in the mailroom just to boost your Farmville stats?).
Of course, it also pays to ensure that the mobile phone you use is also secure. Delete unnecessarily stored private data and be sure to update your passwords on a weekly or daily basis.
Tags: Facebook, Internet, mobile-phones, security, Social-networking