Policy on posting links to Facebook And Twitter

[MaryEllen]

The facebook, myspace and twitter phenomenon is impossible to ignore. People are going there whether we forbid them or not. Links to these social sites may be given out via PM or email. They may not be posted in the open forums. The forums are viewable to everyone. Not just members. Every pedophile and pervert in the whole world can view them.

As always, safety issues should come first. Please do not post any personal information that could compromise your safety. ie. real names, addresses, phone numbers, etc. Use common sense in what you post to these sites. Remember, there are a whole lot of not so nice people out there.

MaryEllen

[Guest Evan_J]

<-feels like he's watching Mary Ellen cover her face from the trainwreck she's fearing but can do nothing about.

I agree with you.

[Guest Donna Jean]

I have to agree that facebook, myspace and twitter are ubiquitous and social networking is the biggest thing since e-mail....

I hope that everyone uses caution.....

Donna Jean

[MaryEllen]

<-feels like he's watching Mary Ellen cover her face from the trainwreck she's fearing but can do nothing about.

I agree with you.

Geez, man. Are you psychic or what?

ME

[Guest My_Genesis]

Geez, man. Are you psychic or what?

ME

lol. I think it'll be alright.

But in providing a link, aren't you still indirectly providing your full name? - the link will be to the person's profile which most likely will be displaying their full name.

sorry, just wanted to clarify this to make sure I understand the rules.

[Guest Hoslers_wife]

I hope this will turn out well.

To the younger people reading this, please don't take her words lightly. You are a MAJOR target for sex offenders.:-/

Love,

Chelsey Hosler

[Guest A.S.]

Yes we all need to watch out for on there including myspace, bebo, and some others....

I usually be on IMVU.com where it is 3d chat room... be careful on there.

[Guest ReginaRenea]

Hi Everyone;

Please be extremely carefull on myspace and facebook. There are an awful lot of unwanted surfers on them.

I know from experience. And it's not good. Facebook has had 3 reports of porno in the last year alone.

Please watch what you do on them. Luv always Regina Renea

[JJ]

I love keeping up with friends and even some family on Facebook but I never say anything I wouldn't broadcast from a microphone to a packed auditorium. Cause that's what you're doing. I also have an artwork profile picture as does my granddaughter. And there is no real profile information either.

I have a lot of Facebook friends because I game and I really believe the creeps out there are a very small minority but Facebook is such a perfect environment for them. And I know that they're looking for easy victims so if I'm boring to strangers they'll move on to an easier target.

Stay safe and have fun

JJ!

[Guest Donna Jean]

I've mentioned before that I've had lots of "admirers" come to my Face Book page and try to contact me...Lots of guys from all over the world...

Someone said to make sure to not have the word Trans anywhere in your profile...

Well, heck I DO have the word "Tranasgender" in my profile and that's what drags these creeps in!

At first I thought..."How cool! Some guy is interested in me...."and it was fun...

Then I realized just what he was interested in!

They ALL get ignored now.

Stay safe!

Donna Jean

[Guest mia 1]

Oh yeah ! I had this lady from Ohio, not you Dee JAY or Paula contact me and tell me how cute I was and was sure that she we had met one time or another and sure enough she was surfing for naive fish

So yes it is very real and be very caeful, my god I’m 65 and what could they be looking for , but a retirement fund.

Oy vey.

: )

[Guest Nikki A]

lol. I think it'll be alright.

But in providing a link, aren't you still indirectly providing your full name? - the link will be to the person's profile which most likely will be displaying their full name.

sorry, just wanted to clarify this to make sure I understand the rules.

not always, i have a facebook, but it isn't connected to anyone but Nikki, my birth name location etc isn't there at all! how is this possible? umm, an e-mail address that is also only associated with nikki! i don't get attacked by facebook throwing people that im not out to at me! lol it's like i have a second laura's account but it is facebook instead of lauras. if anyone wants to add it, pm me or comment! i have two whole friends right now! lol

hugs, Nikki

[Guest Cowboy]

eh, i made a facebook thingy the other day. if anyone would like to add me, PM me and i will send u info.

Or Search "Colton Willis"

just make sure u tell me thru PM or somethin that its YOU. cuz if not and i get a bad gut feelin i wont add ya.

CyberSafety 1st =)

[Guest Pól]

eh, i made a facebook thingy the other day. if anyone would like to add me, PM me and i will send u info.

Or Search "Colton Willis"

just make sure u tell me thru PM or somethin that its YOU. cuz if not and i get a bad gut feelin i wont add ya.

CyberSafety 1st =)

The fact that you're posting this on the facebook safety thread makes me laugh and sort of cover my eyes a la Mary Ellen all at the same time, but more power to you like.

[Guest Cowboy]

The fact that you're posting this on the facebook safety thread makes me laugh and sort of cover my eyes a la Mary Ellen all at the same time, but more power to you like.

i posted on the facebook safety thread because its the facebook thread, and i wanted to let my friends here on the site know they are more than welcome to add me just let me know u are doing so because being safe online IS a priority to me and i wont add ppl i dont know, or recognize. Its not like i posted the link and said add me i dont care who ya are. I posted it here in the safety forum because just like the ppl here at laura's, i take my safety online very seriously (hence y i dont think my 10 yr old step bro should have a facebook page.) and i wanted to tell my friends here u are more than welcome to add me, just let me know ahead of time so i dont deny the friend request. I didnt put a target on myself and say "hey everyone add me!"

[Guest Ami James]

I also wanna add... MyYearbook also pretty bad about it... I admitted on there that i am a cross dresser on there in the past. I got a ton of people who wanted to have a thing for cross dressers or transgenders. It's insane nowadays that people want to do that. I just saw a trans on myyearbook and she or he was hammered with full of perverts.

I thought I would warned about myyearbook as well.

[Guest Edu]

Seeing there is a thread about Facebook and security, I think it's appropriate to share this:

There are some forms of attacks targeting Facebook and similar networks. Just to name an example: http://abcnews.go.co...=7475216&page=1

Falling to any of these attacks may compromise your account (this is, the attacker may gain full access to it), and is very likely to use your contacts/friends/whatever list to spread and try to attack other people.

My goal with this post is to share some knowledge with you so you can better defend against these threats.

Nowadays, most kinds of attacks on Internet are based on a small amount of technical stuff, and a large amount of social engineering. As a matter of fact, there is a single advise that may well protect you from the vast majority of threats:

The Internet security golden rule: never trust an unexpected message (e-mail, PM, etc) of any kind. Even if you trust the (presumed) sender, you should first confirm with that person that they really sent the message. The "sender" field is extremely easy to forge on e-mails, and definitely doable on most other messaging systems (such as private messages on forum sites or social networks). Even further, the fact that a message got sent from a given account doesn't guarantee that the actual sender was the account's owner. In other words: even if a message seems to come from your best, trustworthy friend, it is possible that a virus has infected them, taken over their account, and forwarding itself to all the contacts it finds on the account; so the message would actually be the virus, and that friend might well be still unaware of what happened.

Most people tend to think "my friend wouldn't be sending something 'evil' to me". Maybe your friend wouldn't; but an attacker who has taken over their account definitely would, and the message would look just as if it came from your friend (after all, it actually comes from that friend's account).

So, always confirm the source of a message before taking any action on it (following links, downloading attachments, or anything else that goes beyond just reading text on the screen).

Most prominently, messages with generic and/or "call to action" subject lines should fire all your alarms. This is subjects like "try this", "look at this site", "the files you asked" (when you didn't ask for any file), and so on. Most attacks use these kind of subjects because the attacker normally has no previous knowledge about the victims, so the only way to make the lie "passable" is to make it generic enough so it makes sense on most cases.

Recently, I read about a new form of attack spreading through social network sites, especially through Facebook (mostly because its vast amount of users makes it a very succulent target for attackers).

It struck me as a quite creative form of attack, which makes it even more dangerous, since most people won't see it coming.

The attack takes the form of a message (a PM or a post on the victim's wall), telling to copy some text and paste it on your browser's address bar. A distinguishing feature of these attacks is that the text to paste always begins with the prefix javascript:. Actually, this is essential for the way they work: that prefix tells the browser to interpret the rest of the "address" as Javascript code, rather than an actual web address, and to execute that code.

In summary: absolutely never, ever paste a javascript: command on your address bar. There are very few cases where doing that makes any sense. Even for web programmers like myself, there are always better alternatives for any reasonable task.

In detail: on most cases, the code will attempt to scrap the current page (this means to parse it, retrieving the actual data and discarding side stuff such as titles, styling, layout, etc), and send it to some server controlled by the attacker; then use the recovered contact/friends list to spread itself. After that, the attacker has the victim's private data available on his server, and that of the victim's contacts, and those contacts' own contacts, and so on. This is the same form of propagation as of worm viruses. Only that the inner workings are so different from a virus that no anti-virus program can have a chance at detecting it.

I can't know how much information do you share on facebook and similar sites; but if you take your privacy seriously, you'd rather make sure you don't slip your sensitive data away. And keep in mind that you are always sharing more than you think: given a nickname and or email address and some messages, using a large enough database, it isn't to complicated to do some cross-referencing and establishing surprisingly accurate associations. When the database also includes other associations previously established, the result keeps getting more complete and accurate. Fall to a few of these attacks, and the attackers may end up knowing that all your nicknames and/or accounts on different sites actually represent the same person.

Never hesitate to ask for confirmation and/or advise whenever you encounter something suspicious. For most of us, the better safe than sorry approach should be even more important than for most people.

Well, I hope this helps someone.

Regards,

Ethain

[Guest Robin Winter]

I agree. The only one I even have an account on is facebook, and I restrict everything to friends only. Even then, I'm picky about what I put on there. I don't trust the site at all, and don't believe privacy is respected at all by the site owners.

[Guest Shiki]

Heres me but please tell me you are from here. Its my new name

[Guest TaraD]

anyone who wants to add me can go right a head. look up Tara Dillon.

[Guest Alyson_]

Oh me, Twitter. I did have 2 Twitter accounts. Both were registered with separate email addresses. Twitter kept sending notices for both accounts to my main email address. That suggested VERY strongly that Twitter and such socializing sites keep closer tabs on you than you ever want. Which for myself I don't want them to.

[Guest Samantha Husky]

@Chakittymoon for my Twitter! I'll put it in my signature too.

[Guest Ezzy]

I have facebook but i think i have mine set on private, Can never be to careful with spammers an what have you, so if yall wanna add me you can PM me

[Guest CharliTo]

PM me if you're interested in getting my Facebook. PM me if you wanna get to know someone who first started here at Laura's Playground 3 years ago. I've been full time for over a year soon and have a career in probably one of the most competitive fields

I hardly am able to keep up with moderating lately due to how busy I am advancing my career (hi everybody who remembers me! :3) but I never feel like I don't wanna help out others who are at a point I was at 3 years ago. Just PM me and we can start there.

[Guest Yana]

I agree compoletely! Facebook, Myspace and Twitter are full of crazy people, and it is very good idea not o link it with this (Ihope) our private place.

Yana