MySpace and Facebook are such a big thing these days.  Many of our members have accounts with one or both of these so-called "Social Networking" websites.  But please be warned:  They are one of the largest contributing factors to getting a virus, spyware, malware, or scareware infection on your computer!

Keep something in mind, the old adage of "You get what you pay for" really comes into play on sites like these.

They're Free.  Right?

Wrong.  They're only "free" in the sense of you don't pay a cash fee to use them.  They're NOT free when it comes what information they collect and share about you.  They're also in the business of earning revenue's from advertising content.  With the millions of page views (visits) that they get every day - this means they are serving up BILLIONS of advertisements on a daily basis.  Handling that large amount of information is not easy...and the odds of you seeing an advertisement link which is connected to an infected hosting environment is extremely high. 

BE VERY CAREFUL CLICKING ON ANY LINKS WITHIN THESE WEBSITES.  Especially when they are connected to certain "friend" comments.  If you use these types of websites you'll remember seeing comments that just don't seem right...they usually refer to watching a video clip of something absolutely amazing...but you need to do it quickly before "they" take it down.  Sound familiar?  Stay away.  It's going to put a virus on your computer.

Here's some more information to ponder.  We've taken a very high amount of calls and visits from customers lately that all have something in common.  They use Facebook...AND they all play "Farm Town" on Facebook...AND they all are infected with viruses or scamware software.  Google this - "facebook farmtown virus" and read through some of the results you find.  I'm not claiming Farm Town has a virus it's pushing through...but there sure is something suspicious about this to me.  My guess is that because "Farm Town" has become the new cool game, it's getting a lot more visits via Facebook and thus it's broadcasting a LOT of advertisements.  I'm betting there's an infected link / website connected to one or more of those advertisements.

The moral of this post is:  Be careful when using ANY website and clicking on ANY link.

By the way, here's another interesting thing about Facebook: 

Did you know they now have a policy (that you automatically opted into when they updated their privacy policy recently) which allows affiliated advertisers to use YOUR PICTURES in their ads?  Google this phrase for a list of articles about the subject - "Facebook dating ad".  You'll get quite a few responses with basically the same article.