This is Your Friend... This is Your Friend on FaceBook.

Any questions?

... an egg sizzles as a criminal that has exploited your friend's weak password (or lame security questions), crawls through your personal info and tricks you into downloading and installing a key logger.

The fact is, you aren't really interacting with your friend when you visit a social media site. Each of you interacts with software (most likely, poorly written software) that serves up pages and content to you that are designed to serve as a surrogate for your friend or their interests. It isn't the same thing as having a face to face conversation with them... not by a long shot.

We are social creatures. We like our tribe. We want to belong... We want to trust our friends- our tribe.

Unfortunately, there are some tribes that want what we have.

Incomplete design, flawed privacy and security models and user agreements that hold no one accountable add up to an environment that may be rich in features to lull us into a false sense of security and trust, but is also one which criminals are all too happy to exploit.

Trust your friend. Just don't trust their profile... the click-aholic flash game they are inviting you to play or anything else on your social media site.

... and don't post all of your personal details on your Facebook page. If they are your friends, they already know when your birthday is. Make the bad guys work for it.

Instead, meet your friend for coffee and talk... just pay in cash.

~CPwnk