Its very easy to get enthused about new technologies and start new things all over the internet. But when they don't work out as well as you hope or you lose interest or the enthusiast leaves the organisation, the litter of your work can have downsides.

First, you may be represented by information that is out of date or just wrong, and second, those social networking tools may be open to abuse by others. Facebook Hijacking Points To Social-Networking Holes

The takeover of administration rights to a large number of Facebook groups by an organization that calls itself Control Your Info is just one example of the many security Relevant Products/Services issues facing social-networking sites in general and Facebook in particular, according to experts.

... "Control Your Info" hijacked almost 300 groups by simply taking over unadministered groups. Dave Amsler, the cofounder and CIO of Foreground Security, said the illegitimate administrators have access to profile information, e-mail addresses and other data Relevant Products/Services that members have provided. He pointed out that credit-card numbers aren't involved.

Control Your Info posted this message at those groups: "Hello, we hereby announce that we have officially hijacked your Facebook group.

"This means we control a certain part of the information about you on Facebook. If we wanted we could make you appear in a bad way which could damage your image severly [sic]."

[...] Facebook's press-relations department e-mailed a statement which read in part that "there has been no hacking and there is no confidential information at risk. The groups in question have been abandoned by their previous owners, which means any group member has the option to make themselves an administrator in order to continue communication to the group. Group administrators have no access to private user information and group members can leave a group at any time."

On a personal level, having others with unauthorised access to your memebrships in various groups may be a nuisance or potentially embarrassing, but having your organisation's facebook page being run by someone else is a potential disaster. If that person or group has it in for you, they could make life very unpleasant both for your supporters and your organisation by posting inappropriate or incorrect information about what you are about and what you do.

Do you know where all your representations of your organisation are on the net? Who runs them? Have they been updated lately? Do you know how to delete them when they are not needed any more?

Horror, or success, stories in the comments please.

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