I was recently reading about the furor about Facebook’s new Terms of Service and its subsequent repeal.

All this made me a little worried about what happens to my content, until I remembered that being slightly paranoid pays off.

Not being the most social of people, I stayed out of the Hi5 and MySpace networks for quite some time. Soon after, I began to realise that I was losing touch with some of my good friends, so much so that I’d be sure to drop a brick on the conversation once if ever one happened.

The result of this was my foray into social networking via Facebook. Its initial attempts to scan my email accounts for potential friends bothered me no end. How could I be sure that they wouldn’t just steal my details and use them for some nefarious activity?

My fears are hardly unfounded, but as can be seen from the power of the community that has been built in Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg will have a hard time doing anything that can be construed as “evil”.

That said, it’s still a good idea to ensure that you upload nothing on the net that you wouldn’t want other people to see. Once it’s on the net you have no control over what’ll happen to it.

As a result, I’m a very boring member of Facebook. I don’t add applications that let me do weird things to my friends and I don’t upload crazy photographs. But it still lets me keep in touch, which is what matters. The only photos I do upload are the ones I don’t mind sharing.

Applications on Facebook are yet another concern for me. Their need to access my information is a little scary, given my nature. But it turns out that applications are not the only possible culprits in data theft as can be seen in this article on Yahoo.

Going Phishing

Furthermore, I found the following email in my inbox recently:

While the subject immediately gave it away as spam, you’ve got to give the creator some credit for making it look like something legit straight out of MSN. Had you been a regular newsletter subscriber and thought this was something you accidentally subscribed to, any attempt to unsubscribe would lead to a chinese url, as seen at the bottom left.

This isn’t the only method currently being employed, as can be seen from various users’ experiences when you do a flickr search as below:

http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=phishing&m=text

With such attempts at data theft and scamming getting more numerous by the day, it’s up to all of us to be more careful when on the net.