Are There Dangerous Social Media Sites?

Naymz is an online provider of reputation/identity management and promotion services for people, groups, and businesses. Naymz provides a simple and user friendly experience for those who are concerned with promoting an accurate and positive picture of their personal or professional reputation and identity. Their slogan is, “Empowering Reputable Professionals.” It that appears to be going after something close to Linkedin.com’s market. I discovered the site through an invite from a client and was immediately curious as to what the site did and could do.

After working my way around it there was some surprising results. There are some features for professionals such as the ability to endorse friends or use friends as online references that I can see as being useful. In today’s world of identity theft and having your personal information spread throughout the electronic world. One goal of effective Social Media is to inter-link all your channels to each other.  Once I arrived on Naymz it asked me to Search for contacts in my other accounts:

• LinkedIn
• Gmail
• Hotmail
• Yahoo!
• AOL
• Plaxo
• Outlook
• Outlook Express
• Other
• Single Invite

Something told me to wait and find out more before opening up my world to this unknown site. Thank goodness I listened to myself (which I don’t always do!). Moving past being spared from being put on their spam list along with all my contacts, there is one major concern that jumped out at me fairly quickly.  Stalking. Naymz offers reporting about other Naymz users who have been viewing your profile. While at first I might be intrigued to know “who looked at me?” but, it doesn’t take long to realize, “Whoa! That means every person I visit can see that I was there!”

At that point, I realized that this wasn’t for me. You can pay for more stalking ability or to be stalked more. Depends on how you look at it. So by becoming a Premium Member you can find out more about who’s stalking you. Things like who was visiting my profile, what IP address they visited from (possibly telling me which company that worked for), what country, and the exact time they paid me a visit. If the referring link showed something like a company’s internal webmail, I would also assume that something was emailed, most likely about little old me!

Yet again this all information that might intrigue some or most of us…if we were doing it to someone else. But once you realize that the same reports and data that you’re seeing about your Naymz browsing are being shared with other site members, you might think twice. Makes me wonder how quickly  Facebook users would rebel if Facebook started reporting who was looking at your profile at then telling everyone else who’s profiles you’ve been viewing? And if that would kill Facebook, Naymz may be dead on arrival if they don’t pull the plug on their stalking reporting.

In all fairness I do have to say that Facebook has  an application FanChec which was originally called Stalker Check!! But Fan Check doesn’t mean that you checked their profile a lot. It counts how many times you’ve interacted with that person, wrote on their wall, commented on their pictures, liked their status, etc. ..It doesn’t count how many times you’ve visited their profile. You don’t have to even have visited their profile. For example; if you liked their status or commented on them recently, then you may be part of their ‘fan check’. The application has created some problems for Facebook users, causing their walls (and other portions of Facebook) not to display properly.

Contrary to warnings like the one reproduced above, however, FanCheck is not a “virus” and it  does not download or install anything on users’ PCs, it does not harm computers, and it cannot be “caught” by visiting a Facebook page. As noted on the Facebook FANCHECK IS NOT A VIRUS – IT’S JUST A BAD APPLICATION The Fan Check application is NOT a virus. It does, however, mess up your ‘Wall’ and other parts of Facebook — not by destroying information, but because it doesn’t work properly your wall and other parts of Facebook won’t display correctly. It doesn’t do any damage itself.

The fix for the problems Fan Check [can] cause are simple — remove it, and everything will go back to normal. The developer of FanCheck (formerly known as StalkerCheck) also denied that the application contained some form of virus or malware.” (from snopes.com)