You, and Now Your Kids are the Product - Not the Consumer

You are not the consumer, You, and now your kids, are the product being sold.

The next target market for Facebook is reported to be pre-teens from ages 8 to 13 years old.  Currently, this age group is not allowed on Facebook without parental consent.  There are always easy enough ways to get around parental consent since there is no real identity qualification to get on to Facebook or most any social network.  The reliance is on the honesty of those using the service to provide proper name and birthday information.

If you thought you had security concerns using Facebook before, you surely have more security concerns now.  The question will be if Facebook will allow parental control of privacy settings to help parents protect their families from unnecessary exposure and security risks. Playing games, entering contests, pressing the LIKE button to be included in a contest are all ways in which you open your personal information up to advertisers and other data miners.  Will your child have the discernment to know what is safe and what isn't?  Do you even have the ability to discern what is safe and what isn't? 

Facebook alone may not be the company you need to be concerned about.  You may have to begin evaluating companies like Zynga, and family tree, and birthday applications you use on Facebook to know if you are giving up too much information.  And multiply that by using Facebook and playing all of those games on an Android phone or tablet.   How do Android, Windows, Apple, Blackberry and any other operating system extract all of your contact information for you and how do they use it or gain access to it?

You may want to consider what barriers you can put in place to give you some control on your end.  

How To set some basic barriers for protection:

* Setup a specific email to use only with Facebook or other social network

*  Decide which company's applications you will use and how you will evaluate adding applications to your Facebook account

*  Photos should be stored on another network and not on Facebook.  You can post links to the photo you want to share rather than expose all of your photos to unknown users.

*  Limit your friends list to people you actually know or at least know what your connection to them is.

What suggestions do you have to protect yourself and your family? Please feel free to post comments and let us know.

Also - if you want to write a guest post for this blog to describe how to implement a specific protection, please submit your post request to :  frbbs@aol.com.  You may link to your own blog or website in your post.  This blog is about pointing people in the right direction to be safe when possible on the internet.

Be safe out there.  It's getting crazy.

Related post:  In Social Networking, You are the Product and Not the Consumer