That's the problem. While there may be SOME old friends you want to reconnect too there are others you DON'T. But both kinds will find you
Well, you do have the ability to decline their friend request. That will keep almost everyone you don't want to have contact with away. The only exception is when you both have a mutual friend and you both comment on something they have said. You will see each others comments. Trust me, I have found people and tried to look at their BIO or wall only to find it completely blocked from my view. So, if they didn't want me to know about them, they effectively did it. Until they processed my friend request (which some didn't), I don't have any more information on them then I did prior.
I USED to have a FB account. A friend took ssome pics of me at a birthday party, including my name in the title when posting them. I googled my name and those pics came up!
I asked to have my name removed.
And the problem here is with your friend who publishes their photos with security set to available to everybody. They can go in and set it to only publish to "friends" or a bit wider using "friends of friends". Sounds like you need to talk to your friend more than declare facebook evil. If you don't want your pictures published by your friends, ask them to not publish them. If your friends aren't respectful of your wishes, sounds like a friend problem in real life...not facebook. That friend could plaster that picture anywhere they want on MySpace, a web server, etc.
A friend of mine had his laptop badly infected with some fake AV which two people before me failed to remove. I finally got it after a 2 hour session with it. He got the infection from his nephew's FB account.
The nephew had a friend who had "liked" something which was the virus and it spread from that one contact. Very bad "social" network in my opinion. His nephew gave up on his PC and got a new one, and is so far avoiding FB.
I could buy that the friend clicked on something and infected themselves. I would also believe that this information got spammed out to his friends list. But I don't think your friend just automatically got infected because of this. My experience says your friend clicked on the link to check it out and then infected themselves.
The sad part about Windows is that while better, you can still easily get infected with fake AV's, malware and the such by hitting any type of drive by site. A link in an email, a link on a webpage, and a result from searching Google could have easily resulted in exactly the same thing. Based on your suggestions to avoid Facebook, these users should also avoid email, websites and Google in general since the same thing could happen.
FB makes it possible to
deactivate your account, but your info is saved. If you want to permanently DELETE it try wiki answers
How to Permanently Delete your Facebook Account and feel better. For some reason FB will take 14 days to do the job.:mad2:
Even if you are careful about what you click and what you like, it does not mean that all of your contacts/friends are doing the same.
Well, I prefer to keep my Facebook account and use it...that makes me happy and I feel better than getting rid of it.
Yes, you are correct, your friends might not be using safe habits, but this doesn't mean that it HAS to cause you problems. Like I said, I think you have to click on the links and such to be impacted. And if you are doing this, it's your fault and you are not as "uber secure and safe" as you might think. I've happily used Facebook for years without getting infected with anything. (and I have enough friends who blindly click links and have obviously been spamming out crap...so it's not like I have only 3 security friends and don't experience the same things that the rest of you do).
And there is a ton of stuff that I simply don't click on. I never do links to games, invites to events, follow like links etc. I never click on the stuff for "see pictures of Osama bin Laden here", or "woah you won't believe who is looking at your facebook profile". Crap like that gets you in trouble. Avoid that and you can safely use Facebook.
The key with facebook is to restrain yourself and only put up things you would want the public to know. You shouldn't post pictures that are super private. Anything you put up there, is viewable by at least your friends. If you cannot accept that, simply don't post it.
