Ok, that might be overstated just a bit. Considering the average Facebook user in a 2012 survey by The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project had 245 Facebook friends, we can knock it down to 149,755 reasons.

The title of the project is actually, “Why most Facebook users get more than they give,” and the report can be summed up as follows:

“The average Facebook user gets more from their friends on Facebook than they give to their friends. Why? Because of a segment of “power users,” who specialize in different Facebook activities and contribute much more than the typical user does.”

The summary of the survey supports the above statement with numerous and interesting statistics; however, we couldn’t help but pause and ponder the impact that sharing with ‘Friends of Friends’ can have on a Facebook user’s privacy.

Not so long ago we wrote an article with the title, “How a friend’s hacked Facebook Account can compromise your privacy and security.”

The big takeaway from the post is your privacy is only secure as your weakest friend.

The more friends you have and the more people who have access to your data the greater the risk.  Hackers and scammers actively try to infiltrate networks of users, so they can target them with phishing schemes and other socially engineered attacks.  So keep this in mind the next time you share something on Facebook.

For your maximum Facebook security, we highly recommend that all of your privacy and sharing options be set to friends only and that you are careful who you ‘friend’ on Facebook in the first place.

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