Who doesn’t want to make friends, know about interests of others, share their things to others, be up-to-date and get attention? Social networking is the best way to communicate with the society and friends so it has become one of craziest things among the present internet users. Through computers, social networking has been started as soon as the email and the Internet were discovered. The state of personal information and the privacy concerns continue to dominate the discussion about the social networking. There are lots of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Friendster, Myspace, Orkut, Hi5 and many more. Among them, the most addictive websites of internet users are Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook (leading social networking site with 160,000,000 active users) and Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey & Biz Stone’s Twitter that receives 4,400 tweets every second. By this article, we would like to share infographic reviews of some top social networking sites.
For everyone, it can be a challenging task to decide which social networking sites to use or avoid. As well, it can be even more unwieldy to discover about privacy settings of these social networking sites. At all times, infographics is a bit of a jumble of statistics selected from a variety of sources. In this article, the most popular and the most trafficked social networking sites are ranked as per the level of security offered by them.
1) Facebook
- Rating: 5 out of 5
- Minimum age limit to join: 13
Among all social networking sites, Facebook is at the top of the list due to its personalized settings. Facebook is named as one of the most secure social networking sites of the web just because of its personalized privacy settings. The site permits even 13 year old users to make their own profiles. As well, Facebook continuously create advances in the customization of privacy settings, protecting users’ information and sharing photos.
2) MySpace
- Rating: 4.6 out of 5
- Minimum age limit to join: 13
MySpace provides you total control over privacy setting of your profile. Actually, it provides users the ability to report spam messages and account abuse. You can limit or block the individual members who can access your page. You will be surprised by hearing that MySpace will delete profiles of users who have lied about their ages to get a membership.
3) Bebo
- Rating: 4.2 out of 5
- Minimum age limit to join: 13
The social networking site, Bebo defaults users’ profile to private but if you want to make it public, then setting is required. In your Bebo account setting, you can set a minimum and maximum age to restrict the ages of people you want to contact. At the bottom of each bebo page, you can find a nifty safety link with a fun video explaining privacy settings and safety concerns.
4) Orkut
- Rating: 4 out of 5
- Minimum age limit to join: 18
As an alternative to Facebook, Orkut is a very popular social networking site in Brazil. In place of the usual ‘blanket’ approach of permitting everyone or just friends, orkut members can specify which sections of their profile are observable to whom. Users have also capability to report spam, abuse or block users. User must be 18 year old to join orkut and that’s not because availability of any unambiguous material there.
5) Twitter
- Rating: 3.8 out of 5
- Minimum age limit to join: 13
As per Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Twitter has to launch and uphold a comprehensive information security program which is logically intended to protect the privacy, confidentiality, security, and integrity of nonpublic user information. On coming to be helpful about users’ security, twitter has not the best track record.
6) hi5
- Rating: 3.5 out of 5
- Minimum age limit to join: 13
At the top of every hi5 page, one privacy link is provided that lets users to set a number of settings, for example message and photo restrictions, comment blocking and more. As well, hi5 doesn’t have any advertising that means a less chance of ad spam.
7) Friendster
- Rating: 3 out of 5
- Minimum age limit to join: 16
With the Friendster’s privacy setting, only your friends are allowed to view your full profile. However, a limited profile is still reachable to other Friendster members. A “Report Abuse” button on group and profile pages and a direct link provided at the bottom of profile pages is the one plus point of this social networking site. Also, Friendster lets users to prevent others from certain continents from their profile. This could help user to evade soliciting from other countries.
8) LinkedIn
- Rating: 2.5 out of 5
- Minimum age limit to join: 13
LinkedIn offers some new security features such as the ability to view your profiles as other will see it, and create change accordingly. Though LinkedIn provides security features, hackers can still hijack LinkedIn profiles of new users by detaining cookies made by utilizing the site and then stored on their PCs. At LinkedIn profile, users can now stream their tweets but many specialists advice against this as all of them may not be business suitable.
