Is Facebook leaving the door open for burglars?

I don’t know why the majority of the worlds population have become so naive and lackadaisical about the security of the World Wide Web. It’s still no more secure and as wild an ocean full of dangerous creatures ready to cause you no end of harm and grief if you let them. That’s why I don’t belong to any of these social networking sites who’s atitude is “don’t sign up to us if you don’t want to be social” so I don’t. My continued feeling is the less anyone knows about me on the internet the better I feel using it, and I fully expect any site I do sign up to to abide by their rules on privacy and confidentiality. If I want friends and family to contact me, or me contact them, we all have our addresses and phone numbers. The rest of the world doesn’t need to know, nor should care, whether I’m home, or not, and it appears only the dangerous creatures do. I can see home insurance companies using this as a get-out-of-paying-for-losses advantage if they haven’t latched on to it already.

Yes, people do share too much. People seem to put their every move on social media – especially Facebook, and unfortunately I don’t think they really think of the risk they are taking.

The biggest problem though is Facebook – as the writer says – and privacy settings. Given the research above, Facebook’s fog of privacy settings and constant fiddling is not just annoying but potentially dangerous. It’s difficult to know exactly what people are seeing.

Maybe Which? should produce an advice guide.

Facebooks constantly changing settings are the biggest security concern. When I started with Facebook only people I added could see me, now almost anyone and his dog can. And I’ve changed nothing and not asked any changes either. Facebook are truly pests of the worst kind. That Googles street view and things like 192.com make a burglars life very easy.

This is a little over the top don’t you think. A quick change of settings on either Facebook or Twitter can keep all of one’s posts private.
Failing that it would just be so data intensive for anyone to pay attention to so many random posts. and unless this burglar knew your address already then they’d be reliant on the GPS tagging of your post yo locate your house. This type of tagging is usually fairly accurate but not enough to oin you down to a house number. A street maybe. It’s just so far fetched to imagine this happening.
And the only real support for this happening is a ‘belief’ from a bunch of former burglars that this is happening. A ‘belief’! They “revealed thier belief…” that this is happening. That’s not even anacdotal evidence.
Come on Which? Could you at least think some of these types of articles through before posting stuff that may make people worry unneccessarily!?!

And as for using Google Maps to check for alarms! Come on!?!

@Really. I take your point. If you stay on top of your settings on Facebook, it eliminates much of the problem. Unfortunately, most people aren’t on top of their settings. The majority of people don’t know what their privacy settings are, don’t know who can see what’s on their Facebook profile and aren’t aware that Facebook is constantly changing the settings and permissions. As @PeterH pointed out, it’s difficult to work out exactly what parts of your profile other parties can see. This is an ongoing problem.

The second issue is who we call friends. If you just have people you know as friends on Facebook; school friends, work friends, people from your sports team then you are probably comfortable with them seeing where you are and what you’re buying. It’s something you would share with them on the phone or in email. However, there is an increasing trend for people to collect as many friends as possible – to add a casual acquaintance they met down the pub last night, a friend of a friend – anybody to increase their friend count. They don’t really know these people and I doubt they would feel comfortable telling them when they’ll be out the house and what’s inside. Yet that’s exactly what their posts on Facebook are doing.

Of course we can’t lay all the blame at Facebook’s door. We need to be smarter about using social media; be more aware of how accessible our information can be and more discerning in what we share.