joe's blog . .

Here’s a basic guide to staying safe on Facebook and Twitter.

If you have a Facebook account, or Twitter account, you may have noticed some random posts appearing from time to time on your friends timelines with links to shocking videos or images, or a common one is “OMG – I can’t believe you can actually view who’s looking at your profile”. For starters, let’s clear that up – Facebook does not have a feature that can track who views your profile, and will not authorize an application to do so – so you can ignore that straightaway, and anyway often the links will have spelling mistakes and grammatical errors that give them away. With regards to Twitter, you may notice spam messages or posts with little information other than a shortened hyperlink (A garbled link designed to make you click on it through curiosity).

My first recommendation for securing your profiles is to use a free tool called “Profile Protector” – it’s from a security firm called Barracuda, you can find it here: http://profileprotector.com/ - to install you need to trust Barracuda to connect with your Facebook or Twitter account, and grant the app access to your profile etc, (now this is the sort of things that rogue apps want to do, but as I mentioned, Barracuda is a well-known security vendor so you shouldn’t worry too much about that). Once complete it will provide you with a little report warning you of any issues – if there is any.

My second free utility is called “TheTwitCleaner” http://thetwitcleaner.com/ - it’s a similar tool to the one above, but specific to Twitter, it analyzes your comment stream and gives you a full report on whether you’re following “Bots” (Fake accounts used to automatically post links or spam links) – then you can clean your list up by blocking or removing them from your accounts.