If you don’t understand what the settings and permissions really mean, they might not be what you intend

Example 1) This 23-year-old set her social networking site to private. But on this ‘private’ page we learn much more than she imagined.

Her first name is Jessica, her last name is Massing (look at the URL). We know what she looks like and her ethnic background. How she dresses says a lot about the group she hangs with as well as her socio-economic status. We also know what city and state she lives in. Finding her phone number and address is just a search away. Finding articles about her in her local newspaper or on her school Web site is just a matter of another search.

What Jessica didn’t undertsand is that setting her social networking site to private wasn’t enough to protect her identity when ‘private mode’ still shows her photo, name, URL, city, state, and when she last logged in. With this much information, stealing her identity isn’t hard, cyberbullying is one click away, customizing a scam to match her interests is easy, and so is showing up on her doorstep. To make this so-called private page be private she should have changed her profile picture to something less identifiable, taken her city (at least) out of her profile, used a nickname instead of her real name, and made her URL anonymous.

Example 2) Chelsea assumed that because her social networking site was set to private, invitations to parties she sent would also be private. This wasn’t correct and she was shocked when several people that she didn’t know RSVP’d. She was also upset to discover she’d just posted her address publicly.