Web 2.0, Do You Really Trust’em!?

Let me ask you something, do you really trust all those Web 2.0 applications!? Some of them are just Startup’s and they may get closed after a while, some others are offering really cool applications, but you really don’t know who’s behind them, and if their … ehmm … your data is really protected there.

Third Party IM Applications

Sometimes it is not possible to login to your favourite IM applications such as GTalk and MSN. Either because the IT guys in your office are blocking them, or because they simply do not work on your mobile phone. So, we may think of using Web-Based IM’s such as Meebo, or try to install a 3rd Party Application on our phones such as Fring.

But let me ask you, do you really trust Meebo and Fring? Come on, you’ve just gave them the password of your personal email.

I know, I may sound really paranoid here, but for sure there are some applications and sites that you may trust here. I myself for example trust Yahoo, Google and Microsoft far more than Fring and Gizmo5.

Social Networks

Most of those social networking applications give us an option to invite our buddies. And they know we are lazy to write their email addresses one after the other. So they are really kind, and ask us to just give them our email credentials and they will simply grab our contact list from there and invite them all automatically.

But let me ask you again, do you really trust Facebook, Linkedin, and Hi5? Come on you’ve just gave them the password of your personal email.

Ok, in such case, I sometimes do a simple trick by changing my mail password to some temporary one and then change it back to the original one just after the social networking application finishes its invitation job.

Sometimes simple passwords are more secure!

Ok, I know, I may sound really insane here, but let me tell you an incident that happened to one of my friends. We usually create a hard to guess cryptic password, and then start using it in our Email Application, Car-Fans Forums, File Sharing Websites, you name it. So one day that friend of mine wasn’t able to login to his email, and later on all of his friends received mails from him signed by some guy calling himself The Indonesian-Hacker. It seems that this Saudi-Hacker was the administrator of some Forum that my friend used to have an account there. And as you know when we register in those forums we give them our mail address and most of the time our password there is the same as our email’s password. So it was really easy for that Hacker – he’s not even a Script Kiddie – to break into my friends email.

And that’s why it is really wise to have multiple passwords. For example, you can have three different passwords, one hard to guess cryptic password for the applications and sites your really trust such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. Another simple password can be use in those well know sites such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. And a third password for those unknown forums and Web 2.0 startups that you really don’t know anything about them.