English
Français 
Deutsch 
Italiano 
日本語 
Русский 
Español 
Čeština 
polski 
Português 
Türkçe 
Ukrainian Archive
New High School and College Grads – Read This!
Social media profiles affects college admission, job searches, and careers
A 24-year-old high school teacher in Georgia, USA, lost her job after an anonymous e-mailer complained about a Facebook picture of her sipping wine and drinking beer while on vacation in Europe. An Arizona woman was fired after ranting on Facebook when she was passed over for a job promotion. An 18-year-old Buckingham Palace guard was fired after he called Kate Middleton a ‘stupid stuck up cow’ in a Facebook post. A star high school football recruit lost his scholarship to the University of Michigan because of vulgar tweets.
By now, you know that you should not reveal personal information to strangers or on your Facebook profiles, and that you should utilize the privacy settings on social networking sites. You also need to be careful with what you are posting online because potential employers or college admission officers could be looking at your page.
A newly published report tells us that 1 in 10 people between ages 16 and 34 have been turned down for a new job because of photos or comments on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social networking sites. “The majority (two-thirds) are not concerned that their use of social media now, may harm their future career prospects and are not deterred from using it,” states ondevice research, “They are also more likely to have altered their social media profile to look good to their friends, as opposed to prospective employers.”
If you can’t live without social networking, especially Facebook, during your job search, use it to your advantage.
- Give your profile a makeover. Prune old posts to highlight what’s great about you instead of what you ate for lunch in 2010. Either delete or restrict the view to images and albums that don’t show you in your best light. Get a handle on tagged photos by setting ‘Review Posts Friends Tag You in Before They Appear on Your Timeline.’
- Build a compelling professional profile. Show off your strengths and accomplishments. To keep it personal as well as professional, add interests, hobbies, volunteering, educational information, and professional pictures.
- Follow and engage with companies and career–related groups on LinkedIn and Twitter so you’ll know about company hires and other news.
- Add value to the company you are interested in by participating in conversations, answering questions, and sharing links. Make sure you use solid grammar and communication skills.
If your Facebook profile is beyond help, then consider deactivating it for a time. The deactivation option gives you the flexibility to leave and come back whenever you want. Select Account Settings>Click Security in the left-hand column>Click Deactivate your account.
Thank you for using avast! Antivirus and recommending us to your friends and family. For all the latest news, fun and contest information, please follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
#avastBeFree: AVAST is looking for its next Photo Contest Winners!
One year ago, Avast launched avast! Free Antivirus for Mac, and celebrated with our first photo contest. The results were outstanding – we received 50,000 photos with “APPLE” as the topic, and our Facebook page became the 5th fastest growing page worldwide during the first week of the competition!
Your enthusiatic reponse told us that:
- You are playful
- You like to compete for nice prizes
- You love social media and avast
Enter our new Photo Contest and Win!
We are happy to introduce a new photo contest. This time, however, we leave it up to your creativity. Your assigment is simple: Show us your creativity and visual interpretation of our slogan avast! Be free!
To make it even easier, this time you can enter not only via Facebook, but also upload your best photo via Twitter and Instagram using the #avastBeFree hashtag.
Music to our ears
We like to think that the avast! voice telling us that our virus database has been updated is almost like a pleasant song, something to cheer us all up, reminding us that nobody needs to sing the PC blues.
So it’s great to know we’re not alone, and that our users also think this way. Here’s an example by “Ferrett Steinmetz,” an Ohio-based writer, who recently tweeted:
A quick read down Mr. Steinmetz’s twitter wall shows similar cleverisms about a large number of subjects. You can follow him on twitter @ferretthimself.
Also, feel free to change your avast! voice or even record your own avast! voices via our avast.com Community pages.
Facebook vs. Sharks
Yes, most of us complain about all the seemingly unnecessary changes that Facebook initiates far more often than we’d like (just about the time we figure out how to navigate everything)… but it’s good to remember that Facebook is a free service. Of course some will argue that nothing is really ‘free’, but at least +140 million active avast! Community members know differently. 
Value proposition
Some of you will remember the days of Rolodex. Mine was typically overfilled with business cards and scraps of paper – taped, glued, or even stapled in place. Sometimes a few ‘creative’ oversized business cards or paper scraps would clog up the ‘machine’, and maintaining changes to phone numbers, addresses, and job titles was always a major problem.
So Facebook, for me, was a welcome change. All my contacts keep their own info updated, and I can find them at any time via the search box. And my Facebook account serves 4 key purposes:
Profiling facebook spammers
I’ve seen this happen many times, but this time I decided to get a screenshot of it. In a small box, facebook recommends that I add a friend because we have friends in common… or I get a direct friend request from someone I don’t know. I click the profile to investigate and, indeed, we have several friends in common. But an instinct triggers that something isn’t quite right.
Example 1 – Notice:
- New profile
- No personal information other than “Single”
- Only 17 friends
- All 17 friends are male
- Only 1 photo, with a focal point of breasts and eyes (maybe I should have titled this post “Why men are easy targets for spammers”)
In the cloud identity – can we protect it?
Last few years can be called a “social networking era”. Just remember the rise ups (and depressions) of myspace.com, linked.in etc. These networks are now completely shadowed by FaceBook and Twitter. Even when myspace and similar networks are not that widespread today, they were at the beginning of all. It becomes more and more usual to identify a real ego with social network profile. That’s not too dangerous in its basis, but there’s a big problem – people completely loose a sense for their privacy on internet. This is not an attitude against social networks, it’s only a thought about dangerous habits appearing with the social networking phenomenon. The risk is not the existence of social networks, the risk is how people behave there.
avast! on Twitter
avast! on Facebook