Control Your Privacy
Social media is the new world order of promoting your message. As a rule of thumb, expressing your personality is a GOOD thing. It makes you more relateable and likeable.
However, a lot of people confuse personality with privacy, and that could get you into trouble: particularly theft and online predators.
- Using a weak password – We should learn from Sarah Palin when her email was hacked during her VP campaign trail. The perpetrator simply made a guess, and managed to get into Palin’s private emails. Ideally, you should have a mix of numbers, letters, lowercase, uppercase and special characters; e.g. Ls3*Vt4F. Now I realize that this is difficult to remember, so I would suggest a password management tool, such as Roboform, especially if you have multiple accounts across different social media websites.
- Disclosing your full birthdate – Not that I don’t want to let people know my age, but birthdates can be used for identity theft.
- Ignoring privacy controls – Your Facebook profile is notoriously open by default. Your photos for example, can be seen by anyone on Facebook. You have the option to share photos only with your friends, or even a select group of friends. So make sure that your settings are the way you want it to be.
- Posting your child’s name in a caption – Younger kids’ names shouldn’t be posted, because they could be targeted by online predators – especially if they have their own social media account. This goes hand in hand with your photo sharing option. Share them only with trusted friends (not friends of friends).
- Mentioning that you’ll be away from home – plus of course, you shouldn’t be disclosing your home address.
- Allowing search engines to find you – This can be a good thing for your LinkedIn business account, or your Facebook business page. However, think twice before you allow Google to find your personal information. Now it can be argued that you’d like your high school sweetheart to find you, but that’s another story. Go to the Privacy Settings in Facebook, then go to the Search section, and choose your options carefully.
- Not supervising your kids - The best and easiest way to oversee their activities is to become their online friend. If you want to take it up another notch (especially for younger kids), you can use YOUR email as the contact in their user profile. Children can innocently post their status that would indicate whether they’re alone at home or not.
In conclusion, my own strategy is to keep my personal and business accounts separate. I generally tell my clients not to take it personally, but I will be ignoring their friend requests on Facebook. However, they are more than welcome to hook up with me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and of course, Launchpad!
If you have any suggestions or questions, feel free to enter a comment below.
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Hay Dennis: Thank you for to TIPS. makes me think a bit. jb
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