Lewis' Blog Tales from the trenches of information technology

Why social networking sites are evil… E-V-I-L (part 1)

I don't visit social networking sites. Like many others, I get regular invitations to "join my {fill-in-the-blank} page" and am bombarded with that inane "follow me on {whatever}." I can't stand it. I get invitations to join sites which are supposedly business-related, helping consultants to "network." (And for the life of me, I can't figure out the "follow me" terminology... What, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin?)

Ugh. Disgusting. People might as well ask me to come clean the scum off of their swimming pools.

As an IT consultant, I've been preaching for ages about the possible security concerns these sites pose, let alone the blackhole of lost productivity when employees spend hours during the workday blogging instead of doing the work for which they are supposedly being paid.

We recently had an incident at our office where a client sent a note to my brother via one of these sites, containing some rather specific information regarding her financial matters... As always, the uninformed populace is its own worst enemy. We are the ultimate guardians of our own privacy; if we don't pay attention to such things, breaches in security are our own fault.

There's an interesting write-up here concerning the ever growing spam problem as it relates to just one of these sites, and further info may be gleaned here and here (and the latter link dates to 2007).

Last Updated on January 3rd, 2014 by LewisR