Aug 12, 2008 4:00 pm US/Eastern
3 On Your Side: Social Website Spam
PHILADELPHIA (CBS 3) ―
Have you joined a social networking site?
MySpace and Facebook are incredibly popular these days with more than 150-million users worldwide. But there's a little problem popping up that has some saying, "See ya!"
A recent survey showed in the past 12 months, 83 percent of users of these sites received spam or unwanted friend messages on their accounts. Four out of ten said they noticed an increase in the past six months. It seems junk e-mail is turning some people off to online networking.
Scott Mariano is a social networker who was tired of junk e-mail.
"I did end up canceling my account," he said.
Helen Carabez was in the same boat, though she said, "I consider it annoying but I just ignore it, i just delete it."
Another way to tackle the problem is by customizing your account, using the privacy settings to limit or even block messages, emails or friend requests.
Dr. Larry Rosen, author of
Me, MySpace and I, says the real concern comes with children, who love the idea of collecting friends and are more likely to say yes to every request. Rosen says parents should prepare their children.
"They need to talk to their kids, 'well, what would you do if you get an email that's not very nice, how will you handle it," he said.
Joy Dudley says she keeps a close eye on her childrens' accounts.
"I always have told them to be careful who you communicate with when you're online," she said.
But Dr. Rosen believes social networking does have its advantages.
"It is a place where people communicate, form groups and they also present themselves to the world," he said.
Myspace uses special technology called "captcha" to help capture mass emails sent out over their site. You can go to privacy settings and block your profile from being seen by anyone other than friends.
You can also block individuals from being able to send you messages by selecting that option. There is a setting under the privacy and spam page called "captcha" that only allows friend requests from individuals-not mass mailers.
Facebook told us they do not tolerate spam and also monitor for repeated messages sent to multiple users.
While on Facebook, go to privacy, choose whether you want your profile public or private, then select who you allow to contact you. You have the options of allowing them to see your picture, send emails, send requests to be a friend or see your friend list.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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