Education coordinator for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension says students are revealing too much personal information on social networking sites
Hands filled the air when Karina Berzins asked students at Littlefork-Big Falls School who had a Facebook account.
“That is what I expected to see,” said the training and education coordinator for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension of the response.
Berzins came to the L-BF School Tuesday to educate students and their parents about social networking sites and how unsafe they can be.
“With the increase in technology, there are more and more issues that are being brought up,” Berzins said.
Berzins told the group of students that she at random selected a MySpace profile of a girl who went to high school in Chaska, Minn. Berzins showed students how, in under four minutes, she was able to find out the name of the girl, how old she was, where she went to school, what she looked like, and what sports she played — just by scanning her profile page.
Once Berzins had the basic information off the girl’s example profile, she was able to locate the webpage of Chaska High School, look up the track team roster, find the name of the girl, and view a complete team schedule listing when and where the student could be found — if someone was looking to find her.
“I already found out so much about this girl, and it took me under five minutes,” Berzins explained to the stunned group.
Berzins said a big mistake people make when using social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace is that they are revealing too much personal information and not setting their privacy settings correctly. She added that allowing anyone to be a “friend” on these sites can also be dangerous.
“Even if you know what your friends are looking at on your profile, you have no idea what their friends can see,” she warned.
During her presentation, Berzins also showed students how to Google themselves correctly. She said the advantage of knowing how to correctly locate themselves on Google, gives students an idea to what other people can find out about them.
She reminded students to always be aware of comments, photos, or videos they’re posting online.
“Potential employers, colleges and scholarship committees are able to see stuff that cast the student in a poor light,” she said. “Everything on the Internet can follow you for the rest of your life. Too many students, even adults, don’t realize that once you put something on the Internet, that it is there forever and there is no way to delete it.”
Berzins said she in the four years she’s worked with the Internet Crimes Against Children’s Task Force and presented material to students and parents a lot of eyes have opened to the seriousness surrounding the issue of putting information on the Internet.
She concluded with informing L-BF students that when she searched their profiles before visiting their school, she discovered several Facebook and MySpace profiles revealing way too much information.
“Pay attention to your security settings, your photos, and including your cell phone numbers for anyone to see,” she said. “Go home and fix those settings right away.”
