FireMe! Site Serves as a Reminder to Watch What You Say Online

Always think twice before posting your thoughts and/or feelings, especially when doing it in a public forum like Twitter or Facebook.

After all, you never know who’s reading, and there’s no telling when someone will create website that will highlight your incriminating status updates.

Take the new FireMe! site:  it displays public tweets where users have badmouthed their boss or declared a general hatred for their job.

You know, the type of inappropriate comments that have actually gotten other people fired.

Infact, there are additional stories of people getting canned over their social network posts linked from the FireMe! ‘About’ page, which also clarifies that the website was only created to raise awareness about the dangers of public online data.

Users picked up by FireMe! will receive a link to their FireMeter! score, which is a percentage grading how likely they are to be fired based on the amount of job-related negativity in their last 100 tweets.  Users were also provided three followup options:

• Delete that compromising tweet!


• Check my privacy settings on Twitter


• I don’t care!

Considering this isn’t the first website to aggregate foot-in-mouth comments made on Twitter, it may be time to adjust your privacy settings – especially if you have a tendency to overshare or vent your frustrations online.

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Social Networking Security & Privacy [INFOGRAPHIC]

Barracuda Labs recently revealed their findings in a 2011 Social Networking Security & Privacy Study, which focused on social networking usage, security & privacy.

The results were based on survey responses collected over a two week span from hundreds of social network website users representing over 20 different countries.

Judging from the results, it seems a lot of bad stuff tends to float around social networking sites.

Nearly ninety two percent of survey respondents stated they’ve received spam on social networks, while only a little over fifty four percent of them claimed to have been phished. Thankfully the numbers of folks saying they were sent malware, had their account send spam, or flat-out hijacked were 23.3%, 16.6% and 13%, respectively.

I guess it’s no surprise that only 5.9% claimed to use the once-popular Myspace network since 84% of those surveyed revealed that's where they felt the most unsafe.

Take a peek at the 2011 Social Networking Security & Privacy Study infographic:



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