Yesterday when I logged into my Facebook account, I was greeted with a privacy announcement from Facebook.

Once I continued to the next step, I was greeting with a list of options where I could stay with the old Facebook settings or apply new privacy settings.

I went through each setting and chose what I felt was the most private setting for everything.

Everytime I decide to post something on my Facebook account, I can use my default settings, or, depending on “what’s on my mind”,  I can allow it to post to Friends of Friends or Everyone.  To further protect my identity, I chose to only let my friends see my contact information.

This is a good step for Facebook to take. However, as parents, it is still our responsibility to teach our children the importance of safeguarding themselves. They are at a stage to where popularity is important to them, and they see no problem with adding “friends” that they do not know. In fact, Sophos conducted a study to see how many people would accept their Facebook friend invite and what information they could find out about them. The findings are posted below:

“Sophos Facebook ID Probe findings:

• 87 of the 200 Facebook users contacted responded to Freddi, with 82 leaking personal information (41% of those approached)
• 72% of respondents divulged one or more email address
• 84% of respondents listed their full date of birth
• 87% of respondents provided details about their education or workplace
• 78% of respondents listed their current address or location
• 23% of respondents listed their current phone number
• 26% of respondents provided their instant messaging screenname

In the majority of cases, Freddi was able to gain access to respondents’ photos of family and friends, information about likes/dislikes, hobbies, employer details and other personal facts. In addition, many users also disclosed the names of their spouses or partners, several included their complete résumés, while one user even divulged his mother’s maiden name - information often requested by websites in order to retrieve account details.”

Don’t just rely on Facebook and other networking sites to add additional privacy settings. Be proactive in teaching your kids not to accept friend requests from people they do not know. Be one of their social networking friends so you can see who they have accepted. Talk them about the importance of keeping their personal information private, and install a trusted, parental controls software like Bsecure as an added layer of protection to know where they are going and to keep them from inappropriate sites.