Safety on the internet

With the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, students (and not just students) can be tremendously innocent/trusting/unaware of security issues, providing personal information without realising how open it is, and the possible consequences. The SMH had a blog entry about this recently.

While sites such as Facebook and MySpace are not accessible through the public school system computers in NSW, we still have a responsibility to point out to students the importance of their online privacy. I make it a habit to have my postcode, if I have to give one, as 2000, the postcode for central Sydney (an easily remembered lie) - but of course, this isn't a useful strategy for a social networking site in which location is important as part of your identity.