A Westerville, New Jersey, woman, Darcie Lutz, created a Facebook page to support a mother living in Utica, Ohio, whose four-year-old son had, she said, been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. However, the mother, Emily Creno-King, is now accused of faking her son’s illness to solicit money.

Lutz met Creno-King in an online support group for intracranial hypertension, a rare disease that gives those afflicted brain tumor-like symptoms. After Creno-King shared her son’s illness with the group, Lutz felt like she had to do something and created the Facebook page. However, one of Lutz’s friends who was also introduced to Creno-King had suspicions about the case and told Lutz, and soon a tip had been given to police officials. The case is currently under investigation, though a local children’s hospital has confirmed that Creno-King’s son is not sick.

“Looking back, we all had a question or two about something, but we never imagined that it would be like this,” Lutz said. “We thought we knew somebody and we obviously didn’t… It was a big blow because I had let people know about this and to find out it’s not true, it’s hard to get that trust back again.”

It’s important for Facebook users to always carefully examine a cause or charity online before making a donation. Unfortunately, scams often take advantage of emotional issues like cancer or national tragedies, and while it’s natural for your first instinct to be to help with cases like this, it can’t hurt to do your homework first.

Recommended Resources

PRIVATE WiFi® is a Personal VPN that encrypts everything you send and receive. Don’t access Facebook from a public WiFi hotspot without it.

SocialSafe helps you to create your library of you. It’s the safest place for your online life. Downloaded to your computer, auto organised and instantly searchable. Supports most major social networks.

BitDefender Safego is a Facebook application you can install that will scan your News Feed and help keep you safe from scams on Facebook.

Parents are willing to do anything to protect their children. In Australia, that can include paying up to $800 a day to private investigators to track down and even confront Facebook users who are bullying their children. According to concerned parents and investigators, police and school officials don’t do enough to stop bullying, so they have stepped in to remedy the situation themselves.

“There are two things I do,” said former Australian private investigator Jason King. “Either I put some stuff together and send it to the family, so they can choose what to do with the information, or we take it to the school or police to deal with… I’ve also done a fair few hate pages as well, with families who are grieving contacting me to determine who has set up a Facebook site targeting them.”

According to the private investigators interviewed by The Daily Telegraph, almost all bullies stopped their activity when confronted by an investigator. But still, these drastic measures beg the question: what can Facebook do to prevent cyber-bullying, and why don’t schools and the police take greater action? Investigator Jason King said that he receives, on average, three calls a day regarding Facebook bullying. While private investigators may be an effective way of stopping cyber-bullying, there should be a more official way to hold the perpetrators accountable.

Recommended Resources

BitDefender Safego is a Facebook application you can install that will scan your News Feed and help keep you safe from scams on Facebook.

PRIVATE WiFi® is a Personal VPN that encrypts everything you send and receive. Don’t access Facebook from a public WiFi hotspot without it.

SocialSafe helps you to create your library of you. It’s the safest place for your online life. Downloaded to your computer, auto organised and instantly searchable. Supports most major social networks.

A short while ago we had some users alert us to the fact that their ‘Open’ Facebook Groups were displayed on their Timeline. In case you didn’t know, you can navigate to your own Timeline and click the ‘View As‘ button to see what information displays to the Public. This is a good feature to make sure you aren’t revealing information that you would rather keep private. You can access this feature by clicking the down arrow in the bottom corner of your Cover Photo.

My Timeline is shown below, and you can see that 11 of my open groups appear on this page.

Most people probably realize that an Open Group means just that. It is open to the public and anyone can join in and participate. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you want everyone to have such easy access to this information.  If you have someone harassing you on Facebook, then them having the ability to see and join the groups you belong to is a problem. If you hide your Groups, then this could make it more difficult for them.

We were surprised to find that Facebook doesn’t make it easy to hide this information from public view.  Other sections have privacy controls, but for some reason they don’t exist for Groups. Your only option is to hide this section. To do this, you’ll need to navigate to your Timeline and click  the ‘About’ link just below your Cover Photo.

Once you are here, you have a couple of options. You can click the Edit Sections link shown above and uncheck ‘Groups,’ or you can scroll down and locate your Groups section and click the ‘Hide Section‘ link shown below:

After doing this, use the ‘View As’ feature again to make sure that your open Groups aren’t displaying for the world to see. Keep in mind that people in these groups will see that you are a member, and there are software applications out there that can scrape user information from these groups.

Recommended Resources

SocialSafe helps you to create your library of you. It’s the safest place for your online life. Downloaded to your computer, auto organised and instantly searchable. Supports most major social networks.

BitDefender Safego is a Facebook application you can install that will scan your News Feed and help keep you safe from scams on Facebook.

PRIVATE WiFi® is a Personal VPN that encrypts everything you send and receive. Don’t access Facebook from a public WiFi hotspot without it.

More and more teenagers (and even preteens) are moving away from traditional social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and embracing photo-sharing services like Instagram and SnapChat. However, while pre-teens are not technically allowed to use Instagram (the minimum age is 13), many do easily, and with few questions asked.

“Facebook is not doing enough to ensure children under 13 don’t have access to the site,” said Joy Spencer, a director of child safety for the Center for Digital Democracy. “That raises a number of concerns about safety, and because Instagram then is able to collect personally identifiable information on children, which can be used to target ads toward them in the future.”

Instagram does not ask for any personal information during registration, allowing pre-teens to easily register for the site. (Facebook, for its part, asks personal information to determine if someone is underage.) However, a new revision to U.S. child privacy law that takes effect on July 1 will require social networks to get parental consent if they collect personal information such as photos, email addresses or videos from underage users. Determining age online is difficult, and the new revision on July 1 will be even harder to police. However, photo sharing sites like Instagram are exploding in popularity among young users, and the sites’ privacy settings must catch up to the boom.

Recommended Resources

PRIVATE WiFi® is a Personal VPN that encrypts everything you send and receive. Don’t access Facebook from a public WiFi hotspot without it.

SocialSafe helps you to create your library of you. It’s the safest place for your online life. Downloaded to your computer, auto organised and instantly searchable. Supports most major social networks.

BitDefender Safego is a Facebook application you can install that will scan your News Feed and help keep you safe from scams on Facebook.

Last week, Facebook and Target Corporation introduced a beta version of Cartwheel, an online function that gives deals and special offers to Facebook users. The program gives users a special barcode that they can either print or bring into the store on their mobile devices to redeem coupons. However, when a Facebook user redeems a special Cartwheel offer, their purchase appears on their Newsfeed. (If their friends take advantage of the same offer, the original purchaser gets bonus offers.) Some privacy experts, including Hemu Nigam, founder and CEO of SSP Blue, an online security firm, are concerned about this blatant transparency of Facebook users’ spending habits.

“Users will be expected to pay a price for these discounts — a cost measured in privacy rather than dollars,” Nigam writes. “Cartwheel is designed to promote most selected items on News Feeds belonging to Facebook friends, which essentially removes the anonymity of the digital retail process and adds unsolicited advertising into an experience that many users might consider a sacred opportunity to keep in touch with friends and loved ones.”

Of course, the deals offered through Cartwheel are intended to help the consumer, and there are great incentives for buyers to share their purchases on Facebook. As Nigam writes, it will be up to each individual Facebook user to decide if the benefit of the deal outweighs their retail privacy.

Recommended Resources

BitDefender Safego is a Facebook application you can install that will scan your News Feed and help keep you safe from scams on Facebook.

PRIVATE WiFi® is a Personal VPN that encrypts everything you send and receive. Don’t access Facebook from a public WiFi hotspot without it.

SocialSafe helps you to create your library of you. It’s the safest place for your online life. Downloaded to your computer, auto organised and instantly searchable. Supports most major social networks.

Spam posts are something that Facebook page and group administrators have to deal with on a regular basis.

Eric Feinberg with EyEonipp.com runs several sports related groups that have been under a constant barrage of spam links over the past couple of weeks or so.

Here is an example of one such post:

You’ll notice that the link in the post ends in the .TK extension. This should be the first red flag. These extensions are free and therefore used extensively by scammers and spammers. This allows them to utilize multiple domains for free to wage massive spam campaigns.

Clicking on the link takes you to a bogus discount site shown below:

The spammers have created multiple of these clone sites. Here is another example.

Don’t get suckered in by these good sounding deals. If one thing is for sure on Facebook, if it sounds to good to be true, then it usually is.

Anytime you purchase something, it’s a good idea to stick with established well known retailers. Using sketchy sites like this is just asking for trouble. Not only is there a good chance that you’ll never receive your merchandise, but a potential scam site could have your credit card details.

To add insult to injury, Eric also advised that some the clone sites referenced above  are also peddling malware.

Recommended Resources

SocialSafe helps you to create your library of you. It’s the safest place for your online life. Downloaded to your computer, auto organised and instantly searchable. Supports most major social networks.

BitDefender Safego is a Facebook application you can install that will scan your News Feed and help keep you safe from scams on Facebook.

PRIVATE WiFi® is a Personal VPN that encrypts everything you send and receive. Don’t access Facebook from a public WiFi hotspot without it.

It’s a common sight on Facebook: people posting images, videos or statuses and asking users to like or comment on them. The posts usually contain some sort of promise, like “if you type ‘MOVE’ into the comments section, watch what happens to the image,” or “if this status gets 100,000 likes, I will run a marathon.” These types of viral posts, benign though they may seem, are actually a form of a Facebook scam called “Like Farming.”

These posts work by slowly gathering likes for a Facebook page, usually full of innocent content like famous quotes or photos. However, the true purpose of these pages is often to gain enough traction in Facebook’s algorithm to begin appearing in users’ news feeds. The owners of the page can then post advertising and links that reach a much wider audience because of the groundwork they’ve laid by collecting likes. They can link to whatever products or sites they wish, including products that they may receive a commission on or identity-stealing malware. Some of these like-gathering pages are even listed for sale in online forums, despite violating Facebook’s Terms of Use. (The AOL story linked to above mentions a Facebook page about cuddling with over 1 million likes that is listed for sale at $7,000.)

Facebook users should be both smart and selective about what they like. The act of liking a page can associate a user with that page’s content, and with these underhanded “Like Farming” pages, it’s best not to give them what they want.

Recommended Resources

PRIVATE WiFi® is a Personal VPN that encrypts everything you send and receive. Don’t access Facebook from a public WiFi hotspot without it.

SocialSafe helps you to create your library of you. It’s the safest place for your online life. Downloaded to your computer, auto organised and instantly searchable. Supports most major social networks.

BitDefender Safego is a Facebook application you can install that will scan your News Feed and help keep you safe from scams on Facebook.

Microsoft recently announced that it had found a malicious browser extension making the rounds on Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome that, when downloaded, attempted to hijack users’ Facebook profiles.

The Trojan works by first seeing if the user is logged in to Facebook. If so, it tries to get a configuration file from the website in order to take control of a user’s profile. Some of the malware’s actions have so far included posting “15 YEAR-OLD VICTIM OF BULLYING COMMITS SUICIDE AFTER SHOWING HER BREASTS ON FACEBOOK” in Portuguese with a URL link to a fake video, posting promotions in the comments section of posts and pages, like “Get a brand new Celta paying R$13 per day!!”, and sending out messages via Facebook chat, like “The coolest tune at the moment. It’s really nice!”

Microsoft indicated that the malware has so far only targeted users in Brazil (Portuguese is the country’s primary language), but that it could quickly spread to other user bases. However, they did not say how the malware was spread or downloaded, saying only that: “There may be more to this threat because it can change its messages, URLs, Facebook pages and other activity at any time. In any case, we recommend you always keep your security products updated with the latest definitions to help avoid infection.”

As always, be careful and discerning with any suspicious-looking link shared on your friends’ timelines. Scams like these, offering salacious videos or special deals, often spread virally, with many people falling for their promises along the way.

Recommended Resources

BitDefender Safego is a Facebook application you can install that will scan your News Feed and help keep you safe from scams on Facebook.

PRIVATE WiFi® is a Personal VPN that encrypts everything you send and receive. Don’t access Facebook from a public WiFi hotspot without it.

SocialSafe helps you to create your library of you. It’s the safest place for your online life. Downloaded to your computer, auto organised and instantly searchable. Supports most major social networks.

The ACLU has obtained government documents that show the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI believe they do not need a search warrant to access emails, Facebook messages, Twitter direct messages, and other forms of social media communication. A U.S. attorney circulated an internal document claiming that a subpoena is all that is needed to obtain “nearly all data from an ISP”

The laws regarding the privacy rights of these kinds of messages are murky at best; just last month, the IRS said that it will not access emails without a warrant, but local cases across the country have played out differently. This wide range of responses has led to the ACLU calling for a uniform system of judging whether or not law enforcement entities can or cannot obtain online messages without a warrant. Even in the IRS’ case, they only ruled out tapping into people’s email accounts; they did not say that they wouldn’t mine Facebook, Twitter or other social media sites for information.

“We really can’t have this patchwork system anymore, where agencies get to decide on an ad hoc basis how privacy-protective they’re going to be,” Nathan Wessler, an ACLU staff attorney, told CNET. “Courts and Congress need to step in.”

Law enforcement officials also recently explored the option of making Facebook and other social media sites comply with wiretapping requests. Do you think that these organizations have the right to access people’s online communications? What should tech companies do to fight back, if anything?

Recommended Resources

SocialSafe helps you to create your library of you. It’s the safest place for your online life. Downloaded to your computer, auto organised and instantly searchable. Supports most major social networks.

BitDefender Safego is a Facebook application you can install that will scan your News Feed and help keep you safe from scams on Facebook.

PRIVATE WiFi® is a Personal VPN that encrypts everything you send and receive. Don’t access Facebook from a public WiFi hotspot without it.

A new, viral warning has many moms and concerned Facebook users in a panic. An example of one such message is shown below:

The uproar is over Facebook Community Pages that automatically aggregate data based users’ likes and interests. Here’s what’s happening, a user clicks on one of these community pages, and then that user sees posts, photos etc. from their friends that have the keyword in a status update. For example, if I type the word animal in the Facebook Search bar and click on that Community Page, this is what is displayed:

If you were to scroll down further on this page, then you would see specific posts that my friends have made related to ‘animals.’ If you notice the arrow above, it’s pointed to an explanation of the content located on this page. Here is the text:

This Page is automatically generated based on what Facebook users are interested in and not affiliated with or endorsed by anyone associated with the topic.

So everyone can rest easy. In this case people aren’t swiping baby pictures and using them to populate random pages. It is important to make sure that your privacy settings are set appropriately for everything you share on Facebook.  Of course, if someone sets the sharing options of an image of their child to public, then it would be very easy for it to be stolen and show up anywhere online. We recommend setting everything that you can to ‘Friends Only.’ This post highlights the dangers and the potential privacy exposure by just sharing with Friends of Friends.

Recommended Resources

PRIVATE WiFi® is a Personal VPN that encrypts everything you send and receive. Don’t access Facebook from a public WiFi hotspot without it.

SocialSafe helps you to create your library of you. It’s the safest place for your online life. Downloaded to your computer, auto organised and instantly searchable. Supports most major social networks.

BitDefender Safego is a Facebook application you can install that will scan your News Feed and help keep you safe from scams on Facebook.