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…