Bebo: the stalker networking site?
by Ranita Nand
I seriously think that Bebo should now be named the ’stalker networking site’.
I had my first Bebo stalker experience the other day.
I was spending a quiet Thursday afternoon in Borders looking for a present for a friend when I was interuppted by an unfamiliar face.
This guy came up to me and said, “Hey aren’t you friends with Keegan? I’ve seen your profile on Bebo through his page, Ranita right?”
I was shocked and couldn’t believe what had just happened. This stranger knew my name! Bebo made it possible for this guy to recognise me.
It’s really funny, really. Half of the people on my top 16 friends list live only metres away from me. So why can’t I just go up the road and talk to them or pick up the phone to see how they are doing.
It’s crazy, we send hearts to one another, discuss our social lives, upload pictures and videos and write profiles of ourselves for basically anyone to view.
But is it really that safe?
We’re actually spoon feeding potential stalkers out there everything they need to know about us, and half the time we don’t even realise it.
We’re ultimately saving the stalkers a whole lot of time because they have the information right there in front of them, and it will only be a matter of time before they find us in the flesh- just as I experienced.
Even though most of us claim that we don’t talk to strangers, and only use Facebook and Bebo to communicate with friends, there are still people out there in cyberspace that we don’t know who can access these pages.
Next time you post a comment on a friend’s profile page or upload a new picture, think about who else out there could be lurking around your page and learning everything there is to know about you.
A good way to keep stalkers out of your page on Bebo is to make your profile page private - so that only your direct friends have access to it.
Another good thing is make sure your photos can’t be copied, as you never know who could be saving them onto their hard drives.
Up until the other day, Bebo was a whole lot of fun, but now it’s just plain scary.
I am so pleased you have written about this and I am going to direct my 13-year-old daughter to it. She put up her page on Bebo, without my knowing, and missed the bit about keeping it private to friends only. There she was, her real name, the area she lived and a photo of her in her school uniform - enough info for any psycho to be waiting at the school gates. When I made all this clear she went white. We took her page down. But all her friends are still up there. Some kids just don’t get it. There’s an excellent organisation called NetSafe which has a great site on this stuff.
I agree with Greg, we often take the anonymity of cyberspace for granted, but in fact there is no privacy in cyberspace. A friend of mine had a scary scare a couple of weeks ago. She had some ‘risque’ photos on her home page at a popular social networking site. She thought they were private (only her husband could see them). But somehow they leaked out and soon she was bombarded with hairy men from Texas trying to chat her up. She doesn’t live any where near Texas, but that didn’t stop the propositioning and lewd suggestions.
She’s now taken down all the photos and deleted her profile.
How about someone writes us up a post on some simple rules for keeping things tidy on Facebook, etc. It’s all too easy for loonies to find us - not to mention government agencies and viral marketing companies.
In cyberspace, no one can hear you say “Yuk”.