In today’s Quick Hits, we discuss how easy it is to stalk a stranger through public Foursquare and Twitter updates, why teenagers might soon get tired of Facebook, and how Internet radio station Pandora has updated its privacy controls.

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Why Teens May Leave Facebook

At the Summit at Stanford, sponsored by AlwaysOn & STVP, AlwaysOn founder Tony Perkins talks to “You Are Not a Gadget” author Jaron Lanier about Facebook, and why teenagers may start shunning the social-media platform.

Online Safety Tips for Parents

CBS News offers a couple of tips for parents to keep their children safe online. One recommendation is that parents shouldn’t post pictures of their children, especially nude baby pictures, to the Internet. A second recommendation is more general. Parents shouldn’t post anything that may reflect poorly on their child when they are grown and looking for a job or trying to get into college.

Pandora Updates Privacy Settings

After Facebook took a public beating over its confusing privacy policies, many web companies have taken proactive measures to show their users that they take privacy seriously. Recently, the popular Internet radio website Pandora took steps to improve its privacy settings by making its privacy controls more prominent and offering users the opportunity to disable Facebook sharing.

Stalking a Stranger on Foursquare

In an article for The Guardian, Leo Hickman explains how it took him approximately 10 minutes to become a Foursquare stalker, tracking down a perfect stranger to a pub and learning a wide array of personal details about the woman’s life. The article weaves Hickman’s methods of finding the woman with general information about the emergence of the location-based social networking industry. At the end of the article, Hickman confronts the woman and explains that he is a journalist and was doing a piece on how easy it is to track someone down through what they share online. The woman is suitably unnerved but remarks, “It’s all part of social competitiveness, I suppose. It has become a habit for so many of us.”

Unsafe Social Networking Makes Identity Theft Easy

Sam Diaz at ZDNet talks about the Kaspersky Virus Analyst Summits going on in San Francisco and New York this week. In the article, Diaz discusses how hackers and identity thieves have it much easier now thanks to social media.

“It used to be that hackers going after a particular target would have to study that target, sifting through the Internet to learn the person’s or groups behavioral habits. Today, they don’t have far to go. The bad guy only needs to scour the Internet for social networking data coming out of sites like Facebook.”