The Associated Press lists some good social networking privacy tips:
Provide enough information for your friends to be able to identify you, but not so much that someone could use information to steal your identity.
Consider making your profile private so people you don’t know can’t “scrape” information and images from it.
Even if your profile is private, remember that your information and photos also can be accessed by third parties through your friends and through applications developers on such sites as Facebook and MySpace.
Don’t use the same password for social network sites that you do for online accounts that have banking and credit card information.
Check for updates on privacy policies on various sites you use.
Never assume that anything you post online is completely private. Trust your instincts.
Good tips as more and more people are starting to realize they are leaving a trail of data on the internet.
The best rule of thumb is to always assume everyone will eventually see what you post. Keep that in mind and you’ll be fine in the future.
2 Comments
It is amazing how unaware some of the younger people I know seem to be about their presence on social networking sites. They don’t seem to be aware of the fact that what they are putting out there is being viewed by many more people than their intended audience.
I agree. I got a question every semester I taught my strategic marketing class that was basically “will employers look at Facebook and other social networking sites?” And of course my answer was YES!
They had a hard time accepting this and were quite surprised. If it’s publicly available, people will look at it or search for any way to find some insight or advantage. The best policy is to simply be aware of everything you post with the thought that it may be very hard if not impossible to delete.