What Every Woman Should Know About Orkut

CYBER CRIME AGAINST WOMEN BY DEBARATI HALDER
 

In the late 2006 when I joined Orkut on the pursuance of a very close friend of mine, I found this particular site as an open gallery to show case pictures, and friend’s comments. Nonetheless, I found out very good  “communities” to discuss about varieties of affairs too. But in 2006 /7 the security of the data fed in the social networking sites was very poor compared to today’s security measures taken by these Social networking sites. As such, I had many “visitors” who wanted to befriend me in weird types. No doubt, those who have been using Orkut since then must have experienced similar things. But the irony is, in 2011 also, women have to experience similar  bad encounters in Orkut. Nonetheless, Orkut has developed quite a few security measures for the users, but many of the users may remain oblivious of them. Hence, when in Orkut, check the followings:

1. To protect your wall from being viewed by others including your friends, use the new version of Orkut. You may notice a “lock” sign after each post that is made by you. That is the privacy sign. Once you click “lock”, the communication would be visible to you and only the person to whom you have communicated.
2. Recheck your privacy settings. Do not let others “find” you from the web. You can control this by reediting your privacy set up.
3. If you wish to show your pictures to the world, make sure that you do not exhibit your private pictures. Create separate album for the public and separate album for your friends only.
4. Use pseudo names if you need to protect your identity .
5. Do not let others to handle your account.
6. In your favorite community, use the words carefully. Remember, provoked men and women may see you as a perpetual ‘nuisance’.
7. There will be men and women who may have ‘adult contents’ in their profiles. Do not try to befriend them to know why they have created such profiles unless you are seriously interested to fall in the trap. You may see requests from these profiles to befriend you. Besides saying “No”, you must also ignore and block them so that they do not disturb you in future. The profiles pages of these profiles will show you the options to ignore /block them on the left hand side.
8. If you see your profile has been hacked or your pictures had been misused, do not try to hack the faulty profiles. Remember, it may not serve any purpose and it will anger the mischief monger more.

Happy Orkutting.

Please Note: Do not violate copyright of this blog. If you would like to use informations provided in this blog for your own assignment/writeup/project/blog/article, please cite it as “Halder D. (2011), “What every woman should know about Orkut ”, 6^th May,2011, published in http://debaraticyberspace.blogspot.com/