Social networkers urged to observe confidentiality

CEBU, Philippines – BitDefender, provider of innovative Internet security solutions, has warned social networking fanatics, to be careful in accepting friend requests within the network and in sharing personal data.

An experiment conducted by the company revealed that 81 percent of a large social network's users would "accept a 21-year old blonde lady without taking too many precau-tions."

"The users of social networking platforms do not appear to be too preoccupied either about the real identity of the persons they meet on-line or about the details they disclose while chatting with these total strangers," according to a statement furnished The Freeman.

The study also revealed that 94 percent of those who asked to add as their friend an unknown woman, accepted the friendship request without having a clue about who the re-quest came from.

The experiment, which was conducted earlier this month, was conducted on a cluster of 2, 000 users from all over the world registered on one of the most popular social net-works. The users were chosen in random to cover different aspects such as gender, age, professional affiliation and interests.

The experimenters first requested the users to add the unknown lady as their friend, then, they had several conversations with randomly selected users. This was done to de-termine what kind of details the social networking patrons would disclose to the lady.

Ironically, more than 86 percent of the users who accepted the friend request of the "blonde lade" come from the IT industry, with 31 percent of them working in IT security. The most frequent reason for accepting the unknown young blonde as a friend was her "lovely face."

"The puzzling reaction of IT security employees confronted with possible privacy threats, such as those described in the experiment, contradicts, to some extent, the general attitude towards such issues, as almost all security companies lay stress on the risks associated with social networks. In other words, it seems like policies and regulations sim-ply disappear exactly in an environment where they supposedly are stricter than elsewhere," Sabina Datcu, BitDefender E-Threat Analysis and Communication Specialist and author of the experiment said in the statement.

The experiment also revealed that the most vulnerable users seem to be the same IT industry employees, who disclosed, after a half an hour conversation, personal sensitive information, such as address, phone number, mother's and father's name, among other information that are usually requested as answer to password recovery questions.

"What is most intriguing is the fact that what people will probably never do in a face-to-face real-life situation is blatantly happening under the shelter of an alleged invisibility or anonymity that social networking could induce. Concepts such as 'non-disclosure', 'confidentiality' or 'privacy' suddenly get blurred in the minds of some users when they are chatting on-line with a blonde interlocutor, although the same individuals will probably never say a word about the same topics if they met that blonde lady in person," Datcu said. (FREEMAN)