How to Protect your Privacy on the Social Web

It’s the anachronism of our times, privacy on the social web. Everywhere you look, someone’s checking in their location and pictures of lunch!—each and every one leading the charge in the sharing revolution that the social web has brought upon us. And social networks are expressly meant to easily share all of this information, including your private data—stuff that was off the digital map till just a few years ago—out on the internet. There’s a reason why these services are free; they’re selling commercial access to a product, and that product is… you. Wait a minute, isn’t this your data we’re speaking of here? Ergo, shouldn’t you have a say about what is (and isn’t) visible to the average passerby? Absolutely! A few simple tweaks are all it takes to get your digital data ship right side up and keep curious eyes at bay. Bear in mind that while a lot of this directly applies to Facebook, the essence can be applied to just about any social service you use today. While Signing Up: This may be handy to keep in mind when the next big social network rolls along..err, on the side of providing less information while signing up. The rule of thumb usually tends to be—you can always provide more information to a social network, but you can’t always remove information once it’s been posted. If possible, consider creating a new email address strictly to connect with your social networking profile(s), so that your primary email address is never compromised or published in your contact information. While Posting Status Updates: Facebook may ask you “What’s on your mind”, but unless you’re prepared to let what’s really on your mind go public, head over to the Privacy settings, and restrict the audience of your posts to your Friends or a Custom subset of your friends. This way, that inane late night, possibly inebriated post won’t show up on the newsfeed of a Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) when your friend comments on it. While you’re there, change the “Who can look me up?” settings to let only your friends have access to contact information (email, phone) and not every search engine which cares to visit your Facebook profile! While Sharing Photos: More than your wall posts, be discrete about how far you share your photo albums, since they’re the easiest to copy off and can come back to haunt you later. Like with your status updates, you can use the same mechanism to control who does (or doesn’t) get to see your photo/albums. Plus, if there are photos on someone else’s albums where you’ve been tagged and you’d rather not have that show up on your timeline, you can untag yourself from any picture, which will remove it from Facebook’s ‘View Photos of Me’ pages. Once the tag is removed, you cannot be retagged on that particular photo again. If you’re really privacy paranoid, you could go one step further, click on “Timeline and Tagging” in the Privacy options, and you can choose who can tag you in their posts/photos, and turn on an additional level of protection and elect to review posts friends tag you in before they appear on your timeline. Very handy, try it. While Sharing Location and Travel Plans: While the tech behind checking in to a new holiday spot via Facebook or Foursquare is cool, use a healthy dose of common sense while publicising your location and travel plans. A flippant public post about travel plans and some careless geo-tagging is all a smart criminal needs to know where you live, and how long you’ll be away from the house. For the same reason, be careful not to over-share your daily routine, for example when and where you go for a walk or when you’re heading home; that’s just leaving the door wide open and asking for trouble! While Using Third-party Apps: Exercise caution when you’re giving third party apps on twitter or Facebook access to your account. Some of these apps require complete access to your account, including ongoing access to all of your activities, perhaps even your friends’ information. Ask yourself; do you really need to give that joke-a-day app access to all your photos and posts and friend information? Also, be very careful when you click on shortened links, whether they take you to an authentic site or a phishing site waiting to harvest your data. But then again, this is 2013—you don’t need me to tell you this, do you? While Dealing with Friends: Facebook and LinkedIn have made it far too easy to connect us with people we haven’t stayed in touch with all these years. And sometimes, you realise exactly why you haven’t stayed in touch with these folks! What I do is prune my friends list on a regular basis, else it becomes far too easy to forget who you’ve ‘friended’ over time (and why!?), and therefore who you are sharing information with. If you’re not the ‘unfriending’ sort, at least segregate your friends into lists so that you can choose to share certain content only with close friends, and not with the Facebook friend-world-at-large! Then assign each group different levels of access to your information on Facebook, based on your reading of their loyalties or sensibilities. As with most transactions online, privacy and safety on the social web is one large serving of common sense, with a dash of caution and a healthy topping of skepticism. Stay safe!