Students should remember to be smart – and safe – when online
September 6, 2011 by admin
Filed under Choosing Lingerie
Opinion, Sub Feature Tuesday, September 6th, 2011 
ILLUSTRATION BY BREE JONES/THE ARBITER
Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Google+ and LinkedIn are just some of the many social networking sites college students encounter in some way or another just about every day. They are mentioned either in everyday conversation with roommates or best friends, talked about on the news or accessed by countless college students on laptops during lunch and even study time.
According to the eBusiness Knowledgebase website ebizmba.com, Facebook ranks as number one on the Global Traffic Rank. Twitter is ranked second, LinkedIn is ranked third and MySpace is ranked number four.
These social networking sites are used for countless reasons. For college students, some of those reasons are to keep in contact with best friends, mom and dad, boyfriends and girlfriends, relatives, siblings and even friends on different parts of the campus. Facebook is a great tool for that.
Freshman Mayce Summerville says she uses Facebook to connect to her family.
“All of my family has it. It keeps me connected to my family now that I’m in college,” Summerville said.
Twitter is great for keeping in contact with the world. Online users can access instant updates from anyone important to them in a 150-character “tweet.” By “following” someone, Twitter users receive regular updates about that person or, in some cases, company.
Freshman Ed Kron follows friends, country artists and outdoor Twitter accounts on his Twitter.
The target group for most of these websites are high school and college students. In turn, it’s very hard to find a college or high school student without a Facebook, Twitter, Google+, MySpace or some sort of blog account online.
Many people use these accounts willy-nilly, meaning they use them freely without thinking of the repercussions if they do certain things on these accounts. But a lot of college and high school students are naïve to a lot of facts about the potential dangers of social networking websites.
While these sites have many pros to them the youth must know the unwanted effects of these sites. To use these social media accounts to the greatest advantage, students must be aware that yes, these websites can be dangerous.
There are countless stories in the news about people getting their accounts hacked into and hackers asking their close friends for money. Their friends give up the money thinking that it is to someone they trust, then end up being conned out of hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
There have also been stories of people posting their statuses as being out of town for the week and people subsequently breaking into their homes.
Things like hackers and con artists are sometimes hard to stop or prevent, but some harmful things people do on these social networking sites can be of their own doing.
It seems that a lot of college students don’t understand the fact that anything they put online can be seen by anyone and even if it is deleted it can still be accessed.
Now some people reading this may think that everyone knows this, but by looking at pictures on Facebook either not everyone knows or people just don’t seem to care.
Employers are now looking at potential employees’ Facebook profiles to see if there is anything they have posted that would be a good reason not to hire them. Incriminating photos involving drinking, smoking out of bongs at friends’ houses or even provocative pictures are things that anyone can see, even your potential bosses and employers.
As soon as employers see those photos, your potential career plans can be damaged, possibly forever. The risks are not worth showing your friends how fun-loving you are.
Sometimes it doesn’t even take a photo for an employer to not accept your application to work. An embarrassing comment from a close friend about how high you both got last night could be enough to ruin a job opportunity.
Although there are all of these dangers on the internet, social networking sites are becoming almost vital in our everyday lives. We use them almost every day, and will likely rely on them more and more as time goes on.
A tip suggested by GeekBeat.tv for being safe on sites like Facebook is to never click on a strange link. There are tons of links on Facebook claiming to be videos about a celebrity’s embarrassing moment or of some unthinkable event. Never click on those! They may send you viruses and steal your personal information. It’s one of the most common tactics of identity thieves.
Few things are worse than having your bank account emptied by a stranger without your knowledge. Clicking on a strange link may lead to just that. To counter this, it’s a good idea to have an anti-virus program such as McAfee or Norton installed on your computer that can tell you if a link could potentially be dangerous and put your identity at risk.
Some other suggested tips are to create a strong password for logging into sites with, using a fake email to register for these accounts, getting rid of friends on Facebook who are “infected” with obvious viruses or spam and always reading the fine print before clicking or subscribing to something.
Following these simple tips can prevent a hacker from getting into your account and keep you from becoming the next “Facebook horror story” on the news.
So all in all, social media networks are becoming vital to our world but some people are just plain dumb about it.
Remember to be smart, safe and don’t post dumb pictures on Facebook!
Short URL: http://arbiteronline.com/?p=71875
