Tips on Safe Social Networking:

The advent of numerous social networking sites have set a trend in the virtual society which is so prevalent in today day and age. You will hardly find anyone in your office who does not have an account with one of the several social networking sites. The most popular among them being Orkut, MySpace, Tagged, Facebook and Twitter. Given the fact that most of the profiles are publicly accessible its no wonder that a lot of cyber crimes and abuse is happening via these networks. It great to network with so many people while sitting in the comfort of your home or office but its equally important to be savvy about it. There have been numerous accounts of abuse on networking sites mostly with respect to girls. You can network a lot more safely if you follow a few golden rules.

Avoid Posting Pics

This has to be most important measure you would need to take as a girl to protect the misuse of your pics. Usually the profile pic in MySpace or Orkut cannot be misused much due to the size restriction, but ensure that you don’t post any close up pics on your profile. It is almost mindless to post personal pics for public access. There have been several incidents of misuse reported to the cyber crime departments in various states. The offenders are usually teens of enjoy morphing pics to give it a sexual overture. The last thing you would want is your dad calling you up to inform you that some colleagues in his office saw your nude pic on a profile, it is the easiest thing in the world to morph pics. It is difficult to track the offender in most cases. You can obviously get the pics removed by placing a complaint with the site maintenance group but the damage would already have been done. You can post your pics for private viewing entailing your close friends or relative to view it.

Avoid Personal Information

I am surprised at the number of profiles which carry information about their mobile numbers and the company they work for. This is ridiculous because you are making yourself vulnerable to any misuse of this information. In fact the last thing you want is to put your company information on your profile. If someone from your company like your manager gets to see your profile and saw how blatantly you had displayed the company name for everyone to view while maintaining a shoddy list of comments, you can get fired. People might even start contacting you to get a job in your company. Never display any personal information on public websites, that’s just common sense.

Clear Unwanted Comments

Just like you clear unwanted mails from your mail account you should follow the practice of clearing unwanted comments from your Myspace or Orkut account. In fact you should take care to delete personal comments from your profile or hide them. Personal information available via accessing your comments can in many cases be a free ticket to abuse. There are several graphical myspace comments available which can give your profile a jazzy look, but personal information contained in any of these comments can be problem something as simple as your birthday date.

Don’t Talk To Strangers

Your mom always used to tell you this and it is just as applicable to the virtual world as it is to the real world. Never make friends with stranger who approach you without any reference. Social networking is about building your network with a sense of security derived from the fact that any new people you make friends with is already a friend of your friend, that’s the beauty of it. So unless you are sure of the reference don’t add people to your friends list and worse don’t end up sharing information with them. This applies more to girls since most of the abuse is usually targeted towards them.

From The Author:

I hope these tips would help you network safely. If you are interested in downloading free graphical myspace comments you can visit orangiz.com. This article is can be reprinted as long as the links are maintained active.