Years ago, when I was young and just getting into the credit card market like all other consumers someone told me to be careful with your credit card. You need to protect it and never pay for anything online with it. Then I proceeded to protect my credit card ever so carefully keeping my wallet close and not giving the number to anyone.
Then I would go to a restaurant or diner or coffee shop or an outdoor festival you choose the venue, and I would proceed to pay for my purchases with the very same credit card that I was so careful to protect. Handing it so some minimum wage stranger in a business I did not know so they could go to the back room and do whatever they wanted with it. It was kind of silly when you think of it. Protect the card but give it to strangers on a daily basis. Don’t use it on the internet but give it to the barista to do with it what he wants.
Facebook Scandal
It is not really a scandal at all it is a media event designed to sensationalize and titillate. Think about this for a minute. Facebook has a nickname I like to call it “the end of privacy.” Because what you are doing is taking as much of your personal information as you can possibly amass and putting it out on the internet for everyone to see. Even so far as to provide photographic evidence of your most mundane and sometimes embarrassing moments.
What for? For the attention of course. But with attention comes sometimes unwanted attention, its part of the territory. And then when that unwanted attention results in your freely published information being used by an unwanted resource on the internet. We are suddenly shocked and offended and Congress has to get involved. This is silly at best but dangerous to real security at worst. Let me explain.
What Is Facebook?
This is based on two ideas one that Facebook is a social media platform. It is not, it is the worlds largest data mining operation focused on consumers. The second is that some outside entity is responsible for your cybersecurity. This can and will never happen. So, let me put this in simple terms.
Take responsibility for your own, and your own companies’ cybersecurity, and do not every leave this up to anyone else. Do not abdicate your own personal responsibility ever. And as a corollary to that be very very careful what you post on public information sites. There have been many articles written about the latter, and not enough written about the former. Which I particularly specialize in. Protect yourself no one else is going to do it for you. I will be writing about this more in the future.