Pulling at your friend strings.

The TechRepublic recently posted a blog concerning social networking sites and possible illicit use. The author and IT pro, Tom Olzak, emphasizes the potential security risks to businesses and sensitive information. Rather than focus on the obvious hack and attack on Facebook or Myspace servers, Olzak recasts the hack in a more insidious light. In essence, hackers may prey on psychology rather than code to extract information. Olzak cites the points made in a Psychology Today article about our friendship bonding psychology. Adding a person to your Facebook friends list is an act of sharing and initiates a process of friendship. Sharing progressively more sensitive information, personal or otherwise, is part of our friendship building psychology. Social hackers could tug at those behavioral strings by sharing seemingly sensitive information and an unsuspecting "friend" reciprocates to strengthen the friendship. Group identity, another important aspect of friendship, is also easily manufactured in a virtual environment. As with social networking sites, a user simply joins various groups of common interests. Visual cues of dishonesty are lost in a virtual environment as well as the physical dynamic of group interactions. From an IT professional perspective, human behavior is more of a threat to a network's security than code hackers, in the case of social networking sites.

In a library environment, librarians educate users about potential hazards to their privacy on a regular basis. Librarians talk yarns about data collection by Facebook, 3rd party applications with avenues for further data collection and the direct attack on social networking servers. Those methods driven by hefty terminology and number crunching easily washes over any user, especially adolescents and teens. A more personal approach to patron privacy may mean more to the users. Setting up boundaries on social networking sites would go much further than suggesting the whole site is dangerous or blocking it outright. Librarians could suggest that patrons ask themselves the same questions about a virtual person as they do a person they've met; "Do I know this person?," "How well do I know this person?," "Who else do I know that knows this person?," "What do other people think of this person?," etc.

As Olzak points out, "behavior is what it is" and to hinder patrons from using social networking sites is futile. Keeping patrons informed and educated about social networking, as with other resources, is the best approach libraries can offer.