How Safe Are You

You do not know me, I could live next door to you! I am a very mean person, I could be a stalker, a rapist, burglar, child molester, or any other weirdo that seems to be plaguing our society. You cannot trust me, I gather information from you and use it to my advantage, either to fulfill my personal desires or simply to sell your name and personal data to marketing firms. Would you invite me into your home?

Recently, I joined Facebook to socialize and stay in touch with my family and good friends. After being on the social network for a few days, I realized that all of a sudden I am seeing postings from people who I really have no great desire to talk to, let alone associate with.

A couple of days ago, after giving it some thought I decided to conduct an experiment. Currently, on my "Friends List", I have thirty six (36) names, including family. It is either that I do not have many friends or I am picky of my friends. The experiment was simple, to see how much personal data I could gather on each of you and your families. Not a difficult task to accomplish. Out of my 36 friends, I easily acquired 36 email addresses. From those 36 email addresses I was able to translate those to 24 street addresses or phone numbers by using a variety of Internet people search programs. From data that I collected, I know the number of children you have, their email addresses, street addresses, age, and in twelve cases what schools they attend. By reading your daily postings, I know what men work away from home on extended shifts, those women whom are single, and when you are away from home on a trip. Out of thirty that are employable age, I know where twenty eight of you work.

Out of everyone on my friend list, I have hundreds of pictures of you, your family, including your children. From your profile list and your postings, I could easily form a profile on each of you.

I do not mean this to scare you to death, but in the world we live in today, danger could be living next door. You are trusting, like I am, but then I gave it some thought and did a little more collection of data. I have 36 friends on Facebook, but each of those friends have other contacts that I do not know, yet they have access to my information including my family members. The number is startling. From the 36 friends that I maintain, 4,135 individuals have access to my information. They are friends of friends that can and do post on our inner circle of friends. The number of friends that those individuals have would be astronomical. If I can gather 4,135 unknowns out of just 36 friends, how many do have lurking in the background that you know nothing about.

Spend a few minutes and go through your "Friend List" then go their profile and see how many friends they have, whom you do not know anything about. It is scary how fast the list multiples.
Again to make my point from my prospective: 36 Friends = 4,135 People of which I do not know 4,099 of them or anything about them. "A Thought To Ponder"