Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.
Facebook is making it easier for people who express suicidal thoughts on the social networking site to get help.
A program launching December 13th enables users to instantly connect with a crisis counselor through Facebook’s “chat” messaging system.
The service is the latest tool from Facebook aimed at improving safety on its site, which has more than 800 million users. Earlier this year, Facebook announced changes to how users report bullying, offensive content and fake profiles.…Read More
Students will click on just about anything posted to their Facebook walls—a social media habit that has brought a flood of malware to college campus networks.…Read More
It’s been less than a month since BitDefender launched its Facebook app Safego, offering a scan to Facebook users of the links posted to their profile. As the emphasis of much malware shifts from email to social networks, the app offered a preventative method, of sorts, to help cut down on malware’s spread. Just how much malware is out there? Based on the scans that BitDefender has run so far, about one-fifth of Facebook users have some sort of infection in their news feeds, says ReadWriteWeb. According to the app’s Facebook page, “Since its launch (almost a month ago), BitDefender safego scanned 17 million Facebook posts and it has detected infections on the news feeds of around 20% of its users. We detected several types of scam waves.”
CNET reports that “Over 60 percent of attacks come from notifications from malicious third-party applications on Facebook’s developer platform, the study found. Within that, the most popular subset of “attack apps” (21.5% of total kinds of malware) were those that claim to perform a function that Facebook normally prohibits, like seeing who has viewed your profile and who has “unfriended” you. 15.4% lure in users with bonus items for Facebook games like free items in FarmVille; 11.2% offer bonus (yet bogus) Facebook features like free backgrounds and “dislike buttons,” 7.1% promise new versions of well-known gaming titles like World of Warcraft; 5.4% claim to give away free cell phones; and 1.3% claim to offer a way to watch movies for free online.”
Facebook’s new online messaging service makes users of the social networking site more vulnerable to identity theft by cybercriminals, computer security firm Sophos warned Thursday.
According to the AFP, it urged users to be aware of the security risks before signing up for Facebook’s next-generation online messaging service that blends online chat, text messages and other real-time conversation tools with traditional email.
“Users need to realise that these new features increase the attack surface on the Facebook platform, and make personal accounts all the more alluring for cybercriminals to break into,” said Sophos senior technology consultant Graham Cluley.…Read More
A Washington, D.C.-based privacy advocacy group and nine other organizations have filed a complaint against Facebook over the online social network’s latest privacy changes.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) said it has asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to look into the changes Facebook has made to its users’ privacy settings and to force Facebook to restore its old privacy safeguards. The changes, unveiled last week, include treating users’ names, profile photo, friends list, gender, and other data as publicly available information.
The complaint says the changes diminish user privacy by disclosing personal information to the public that was previously restricted. (See “How to protect your privacy on Facebook.”)…Read More
Over the past week, Facebook has been nudging its users to review and update their privacy settings. The site has given users many granular controls over their privacy, more than what’s available on other major social networks. Still, in updating their privacy settings, several users might have made more information about themselves public than what they had intended.
If you want to stay out of people’s view, but still want to be on Facebook, here are some things to look out for as you take another look at your settings. (See “Facebook faces flak over privacy changes.”)
1. Some of your information is viewable by everyone.…Read More