A number of great articles have come to the forefront in the news of late about the risks of social networking and privacy. Specifically, privacy issues that are the result of users (mostly younger people) sharing too much information online.

Many teens would be astonished to know how much information about themselves that someone could glean from their Facebook profile, for example. Or how much additional information can be gleaned by using free tools like Canada411.com. Phone numbers, home addresses, schools - all of this information poses a security risk to young people when posted online. Not to mention all the photos. Identity theft becomes an issue, in addition to risks to ones reputation or even personal safety.

comScore indicates that nearly 17 million Canadians are on Facebook, and 4.5 million are on MySpace. The Globe and Mail recently completed a 2 month investigation of social networking sites to prove a point about the information a casual observer can gather on an individual.

Anastasia Goodstein, author of Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens are Really Doing Online, believes that teens are pre-conditioned to sharing personal information because of a level of openness that is reflected to them in reality television. Attention is sought after, and part of that involves openly sharing minute details of one’s life, and privacy goes out the window.

That said, somewhere in the area of 30-40% of Facebook users actually read and modify their privacy settings, opposed to less than 1% on most other websites. In terms of privacy, 100% of people need to be aware of the privacy options available to them, and also of the risks associated with exposing certain types of information.

A whole new industry has sprung up to help people clean up information they have shared online. For example, parents will hire a company to clean up the social networking profiles of their kids as they graduate from university. Research indicates that 77% of employers check social networking profiles, so this isn’t a bad idea.

Continue reading more here or read about 5 ways to save face with Facebook here.