Online profiles have become a mine of personal information ready for the picking, most profiles’ security settings have not been set properly and anyone with an internet connection can browse through it and find any piece of information on you, even things you don’t want the world to know.

Vanity Metrics are the numbers that you hear batted around meetings; you’ve heard them, “last month we had X page views an hour” “Picked up X new ‘Likes’ last week”. Some of you sat back thinking “why are they looking at these figures? What’s the point?” but you didn’t say anything. It’s times like these that offer lessons from our youth that stick with us and resurface at the most appropriate times.  I can still hear the faithful voice of Sgt. Slaughter saying “Knowing is half the battle” good job Hasbro.

The topic has been trending since it exploded in March. There are numerous stories of companies who have coerced their employees (or future employees) onto giving them access to their personal Facebook accounts. In the U.S., where this “trend” has been spotted, the latest victim is Kimberly Hester, a teacher’s aide at Frank Squires Elementary in Cassopolis who is currently involved in a legal fight against the board after she was suspended without pay when she refused to provide her Facebook password. And she’s not alone, earlier last month the Associated Press reported of earlier cases of employers asking prospective employees to disclose their passwords or “friend” an HR representative on the social media site in order to have a look around their profile.

A new generation of Facebook Scams has emerged just in time for the launch of Timeline – Facebook’s new profile layout. And while these changes have more than one user celebrating Facebook’s evolution, there are a large number of defectors who are begging Facebook to let them revert back to their old profiles.

Banning employees from Facebook, Twitter and other sites shows a 30% increase in computer security breaches

TELUS and the Rotman School of Management have published their third annual IT security study. This time, the study revealed an increase in the number of security breaches in both government entities and companies in the private sector; with government entities experiencing twice the number of attacks – almost a 74% increase. Most of these attacks are aimed at obtaining sensitive citizen data for identity theft purposes.

By now many of you have read about security site Sophos recently released post on Facebook’s report on compromised accounts. According to the released infographic, 0.06% of the 1 billion logins per day are compromised. It does not sound like a threatening number until you realize we are still talking about roughly 600,000 accounts a day.  Facebook’s report also indicated that less than 4% of shared content on Facebook is spam and less than 5% of Facebook users actually experience spam on any given day.

It seems like Facebook will not let brands take a breather, during the last couple of weeks it has released several features that will completely change the way users interact with brands on the social media platform. On a recent post, we discussed the pros and cons of Timelines. We mentioned how information on a user’s “Likes” over time is now readily and easily available – all you need to do is scroll down. Now, Facebook is launching “People Talking About” – a new metric for fan pages.

Yesterday’s announcement at the F8 conference unveiled Facebook’s latest attempt to reinvent itself. They introduced something called the Timeline – “it is how you can tell the whole story of your life on a single page”. With this introduction, we are presented with a vertical summary of your entire (Facebook) life. All of your posts, comments, tags, photos, check-ins and Likes are displayed on this Timeline and events are organized monthly and eventually yearly.