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Facebook Timeline Looms: What You Need to Know

Written by PCWorld Tuesday, 31 January 2012 08:51

cloudcomputing Soon Facebook users who have been avoiding the social network’s Timeline feature won’t be able to stave it off any longer and will be seeing their profiles change considerably. That’s because Facebook is making Timeline compulsory and is rolling it out to users in the next couple of weeks.

You should be aware of several things before the launch. Here's how to prepare.

Are Your Posts Viewable by Strangers?

Instead of a linear stream of your posts, the new Timeline is a visual aggregation of everything you’ve ever done on the site: the information you’ve included on your profile, your photos, everything you’ve ever “liked,” any Facebook apps you’re using, a map showing where you’ve been (according to geo-tagged posts and photos), as well as a Timeline of everything you’ve ever posted.

The problem is that Facebook seems bent on making all of that data more public. Now any post that you make defaults to Public, so if you forget to choose “friends” in the inline audience selector when you post something, the entire world can see it.

That’s why it’s very important that you check out how your Timeline looks when other people view it. You may find that many of the posts you intended for your friends are public.

Some Security Concerns

Security firm Sophos polled 4000 Facebook users, asking them what they think of the new Timeline and the response was overwhelmingly negative, with 51 percent saying the feature worries them and another 32 percent saying they don’t know why they’re still on Facebook.

For one thing, with more of your data possibly accessible by strangers, it may be easier for criminals to profile people and glean personal information.

The reality is that personal data is very valuable to criminals. For example, with enough information a bad guy can impersonate someone in order to do things like pull off phishing scams.

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Author of this article: PCWorld

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