It's becoming almost impossible to hide from the network...

It turns out that Facebook’s mapping of the world’s social connections goes beyond even its 500 million+ members.

In an interesting little experiment, the BBC’s Technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones demonstrates that it knows a fair bit about you even if you haven’t signed up yet.

He sets up a profile for a friend who has not used Facebook at all before and it suggests friends based on existing members who have emailed her before.

You can read more about the experiment on Rory’s blog.

This actually solves, or confirms the solution to something that puzzled me for a while. I’d done some PR work a long time ago for a private individual some years ago and Facebook kept suggesting that I should be their friend, and yet there were no connections at all in our networks.

After a while I realised that my webmail account which I log into Facebook with was most likely where the service was able to make the connection. Still it felt eery.

Rory also points out that this shows how it is possible to to set up a profile for somone without your actual permission – another example of online identity theft risk.

The moral of the story? As I say in the second rule of Me and My Web Shadow: Be the best and first source of information about yourself. That means even if you don’t want to be an active Facebook user, you should establish your online profile so that people can find you.

Facebook is increasingly being used as a kind of form of identification online now for other web services too, so securing your Facebook profile should really be part of guarding your online identity.

And after all, if Facebook knows who you are and who you know anyway, what’s the point in staying off of the network?

Is there enough information about you on the web for someone to steal your identity? Very possibly.

Is there enough information available by phoning around or going through your bins. Definitely.

A blog post on the social networks, security, privacy and identity theft by New Statesman journalist Jason Stamper is well worth a read. Jason carried out his own experiment, using publicly available Foursquare and social network information to build up a profile of a stranger.

By way of illustration, I searched Foursquare for people who had “checked in” their home address — telling the world exactly where they live and also displaying it on a handy map. I soon found an attractive 20-something year-old advertising agency executive, who had posted the address of her London flat. She had also “checked in” at her workplace, so I also knew where she worked and for whom.

He goes on to discuss issues around ID theft…

It’s no laughing matter: identity theft is on the rise. It costs the British economy an estimated £1.7bn a year, with the number of Brits falling victim to identity theft jumping 23 per cent in the first quarter of this year alone, according to fraud prevention service CIFAS.

He quotes James Jones of UK credit information company, Experian:

“There is a huge disconnect between the privacy we crave and the information we give away on social networks. It’s hardly surprising that identity fraudsters have been cashing in.”

That disconnect is a result of the difficult balancing act most people are attempting when they use the social web. We are benefitting from having a public identity and being able to connect with others, but in doing so we have to make ourselves, and our personal data, a little more public.

Before we get too nervous, it is worth remembering that identity theft pre-dates the mainstream use of social networks like Facebook. Identity thieves, private investigators and for that matter journalists have always found ways to elicit personal information by hacking voicemail accounts, or pretending to be other people and calling up banks and utility firms to get the information they need or just .

Some of the approaches and advice from Me and My Web Shadow is relevant for people worried about this:

• Draw a line between public and private: We all need to be clear about what information we are and aren’t happy to share. Some are happy to share almost everything about themselves, others just the bare minimum of professional information. It helps if we have thought through and almost have our personal policy in place.
• Remember that you are always on the record: Posting your personal information on social networks even when you think or feel you are in a private space isn’t a good idea. Some people I know even avoid posting their phone numbers in the private direct messages on Twitter in case this becomes public.
• Audit / review your personal online presence: Especially if you have a large number of connections online on services like Facebook, it is easy to lose track of who has access to what information. It pays, I think, it have a regular review every six months of who can see what, how contacts are grouped when you share information etc.
• Use a credit scoring alerts service: The main concern for most people regarding identity theft is that people will commit fraud using their name.  to check when someone might be using your identity to apply for credit – Experian’s own CreditExpert is very good in the UK and equivalent services are available in most countries.

Bottom line – we need to be careful online just as we are offline with our personal information. It is worth thinking about how much information we share online carefully, just as we need to think about how we get rid of paper bank statements or who might hear or see our PIN number.

Don’t panic. But don’t be too laid back about your personal information online either.

Image: Preferable to premium rate phonelines? Initiatives like Teach Your Granny to Text spread understanding of new technology...

As social networks become a part of most people’s lives, all sorts of services are springing up to help them, from mobile phone apps to reputation search engines. There is though a darker side, of spammers, scam artists and money-making schemes.

I came across an advert recently for Social Network UK Helpline, which charges people £1.50 a minute for advice about using social networks.

The service is run by a company whose founder has previously been investigated by Mirror journalists for providing similar “services” providing premium rate advice about eBay and PayPal. A call to the latter by the journalists about how re-set a password cost £15 – information that was readily available on PayPal’s help section.

It’s sad to think that vulnerable people confused about privacy and other social network issues may run up big bills using such a service. It also emphasises the responsibility social networks have to their users to make their support pages easy to use.

Meantime, the best that the more web literate people can do is offer to help those with less knowledge. Schemes like Teach Your Granny to Text and other initiatives from the magnificent We Are What We Do are an optimistic counterpoint to the depressing influx of companies preying on people’s lack of experience in the social web.

Teach yourself how social networks work and then tell your friends and family…

In the past few weeks there has been a lot of conversation online about the rights and wrongs of Facebook’s privacy settings. The New York Times published this visual representation of the complex nature of them. It has made many people feel vulnerable and anxious about controlling the personal information that Facebook stores and shares. To try and tackle this, Facebook has rolled out some new tools for managing those settings – claiming that this is Making Control Simple.

This article talks you through these new top level privacy controls and should act as an update to the Facebook chapter in Me and My Web Shadow. Hope it’s useful.

Three new ways to control your privacy on Facebook

If you click on the Account tab on your Facebook page and then select the Privacy Settings option you will see a page that looks like this.

There are three new ways you can manage your personal information from this page.

1. The content that you upload or create on Facebook – who sees what?

You can now set a single, over-riding rule for who sees the stuff that you publish on Facebook – from pictures to email addresses.

The options are (from the most open to the most private):

• Everyone
• Friends of friends
• Friends only
• Recommended
• Custom

The first three options are self-explanatory. By selecting one of these you apply that rule to everything that you can publish or share, or that other people can see or comment on via your profile pages or news stream items.

The fourth option – the Recommended option – will allow:

• everyone to see your status updates, your pictures, your likes, your comments and notes and your family and friend details
• friends of friends to see any pictures or videos that you are tagged in, your religious and political views and your birthday
• only your friends will be able to comment on your stuff or see your contact details such as your email, phone number and IM details

The Customise option allows you to set different settings for each of those elements, including restricting that information so that only you can see it.

If you are concerned about your privacy and want to make sure that no one that you don’t know can see your stuff, then a single click on the Friends only option will lock everything down.

2. What information do people see about you when they are searching for you in the Facebook directory (or Google)?

The second area of information to take control of is what’s available to those who are searching for you – either within Facebook, or beyond.

At the top of the Privacy Setting page there is now an option to view Basic Directory Information. If you click the View Settings link you will see this page:

From here you can decide the following things:

• Who can search for you on Facebook – this over-rides all of the other settings, so if you select anything other than Everyone here you introduce strong restrictions on who can find you at all on Facebook.
• Who can send you a friend request – again, unless you select Everyone here, the people who can connect with you on Facebook are completely restricted to those who are already your friends, or those who are  a friend of a friend.
• Who can send you messages – use this to stop those you don’t know you sending you messages other than friend requests.
• Who can see your list of friends – use this to control whether people you aren’t yet connected with can see your other connections.
• Who can see details of your employment, your education, or your location
• Who can see the things you Like or Groups or Pages you interact with in a directory listing

As with the other privacy settings – the options are: everyone, friends of friends, friends only or even just you.

If you select Everyone, this information can appear in Google as well as in Facebook directory searches, so consider carefully how much information you want to share with the world beyond your name and the option to connect with you on Facebook.

3. The information you share with other organisations through “apps” and tools

Facebook is now the biggest social network on the planet, and that makes it a very attractive place for organisations and marketers to try and get your attention and connect with you.

The development of “apps” has become an important part of how Facebook works, but it’s also the place where your personal data is most likely to end up in the hands of people that you don’t know and may not wish to trust.

On the bottom left corner of the Privacy Settings page there is now the option to Edit your settings for Applications and Websites.

If you want to completely lock down your privacy here, you can now Turn off all platform applications with a single click. That means that all of the quizzes, games, connections to other social networks and so on that you may have added to your profile over time will be switched off.

Remember, though, if you use this option and then in the future add a new app, you will be required to re-activate the apps platform. So at that point it will be worth just taking a moment to revisit this page to check what you are opening back up.

Alternatively, you can use the Remove unwanted or spammy applications option to delete those apps that you no longer wish to use.

Matt Zuckerberg at Facebook said in May: “I am pleased to say that with these changes the overhaul of Facebook’s privacy model is complete. If you find these changes helpful, then we plan to keep this privacy framework for a long time. That means you won’t need to worry about changes. (Believe me, we’re probably happier about this than you are.)”

But be assured that there will be further updates to the Me and My Web Shadow on this topic as and when Facebook rolls out new tools for managing your privacy.