Tips to Protect Your Privacy on Orkut

This post highlights various privacy breaches you can experience and the bad part is, you are unaware of it. I would highly recommend this post since it covers all possible security measures to protect your identity and privacy on orkut. This is a must read for the girls and ladies on orkut since there are all types of people on orkut (1,2). Here are some tips you should seriously follow on orkut.

» Profile with personal info - Available to public, some information can be kept private.

• Never give your complete address in public.
• Remember to hide your pin code. As it’s a very easy field if someone wants to pin-point your location.
• Also hide your phone number or better don’t disclose it on orkut.

» Photo on the Profile - Available to public

• It is always better not to share your photograph.
• Even then, if you decide to put one, put a long shot, in group and no close-ups.
• Never put your passport size photo. It might be used to make forged passport of some gangster or a criminal who may look similar to you.

» Orkut Albums - Available to Public, Can be Kept Private

• If you have uploaded your pictures in orkut albums then you must block strangers from viewing it.
• You must avoid uploading your images since you cannot be sure if orkut privacy features are really secure?

» Scrapbook : Scraps Your Friends Write for You - Available to Public, Can Be Blocked

• Never disclose private data like phone number, email address, postal address etc. on the scrapbook.
• Never discuss your personal life, like your family life, your girlfriend or boyfriend names etc.
• Make Sure you hide your scrapbook from strangers and allow only friends to write in your scrapbooks.

» Testimonials (from friends) - Read only for public, friends on list can only write.

• Accept testimonials only from friends you have seen and you know them personally.
• You can even delete an existing testimonial you already accepted.

» Your Friend list on Orkut - Available to public

• There is nothing much you can do with this, as there is no control at your end to restrict the view of this.
• Add only the friends you know to avoid misrepresentation of you as well as your profile.

» Communities - Available to Public

Even here you cannot control the access to your communities, which is a major drawback. For instance, you are a guy from New Delhi, India. You shall join the community dedicated to it. This shall reveal your information that you stay either near New Delhi and you were in India, even if you have tried to camouflage your information using above steps.

» What Orkut Should but does not Offer?

• Security to your personal profile from anonymous visits
• Security to your scrapbook from anonymous writes (implemented)
• Security to your photographs from anonymous viewing and downloading (implemented)
• Security to your friends lists and joined communities from anonymous access

This means your personal data is at risk and can be misused. Phone numbers can be used for cold calls, email accounts can be spammed, photos can be misused, and personal data can be used to create other accounts and so on…

Although Orkut can be fun, it could a place for spammers or hackers or anonymous people to grab your personal details and use against you, you just need to be little careful to avoid your personal data from getting misused.

» Credits and References

Thanks Merinews for the wonderful article. We have updated the article with some important tips

sourcE: http://www.orkutplus.net/2007/03/expert-tips-to-play-safe-on-orkut-must.html