There’s a certain sense of naivety that goes along with folks who sign up for social networking. After all, online is a great place to share information, photos, play games, and interact with these people. The leader in this field has to be Facebook, hands down.
BusinessWeek, last summer, reported that Facebook is the number one network globally. It is an excellent example of how you can create a network of friends and stay in touch. I have an account and stay in touch with The Boy in Toronto, the Wease in LaSalle, and Bubby next to me on the couch. At one time, they were family, now they’re more than that — their friends.
They are good friends too. I trust them with my information and they trust me with theirs even though the threat of cutting off allowances really doesn’t mean much anymore.
I do have other friends too. These friends are a little less close. These friends are folks that have asked to be friends of mine and I’ve carefully made sure that I know who I let into this circle of friends.
Now, it gets serious. It’s one thing to let my kids know that my favourite colour is green but does the rest of the world need to know? Obviously, your favourite colour is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to information that you provide online.
Facebook provides a complete section about how you control who gets to see your information. It should be a setting that is pushed to users periodically to verify. Since it isn’t, all users should take a review of things just so that you know what information you’re providing and how others see you and your personal details.
The link to check when settings appears right on the main menu.
Check your privacy settings, in particular your profile settings. It is here that you determine who has access to what. It does get serious because there are typically two settings – “Your Friends” and “Friends of Friends”. This “Friends of Friends” should give you some concern. While you may carefully select your friends, how do your friends choose their friends? In some circles, folks try to have as many friends as they can at the expense of wise choices. With that setting, the decisions made by others have an impact on you.
Above and beyond these settings, you have control over all information that you provide. Depending upon your ultimate goal, I would suggest that less is best. For example, there’s a spot for your birthday. You may wish to let people know that your birthday is on August 14 so that they don’t miss it. But, do you need to provide the year so that your friends or friends of a friend know that you’re a 16 year old attending a particular secondary school?
So, I would suggest that it is time well spent to go over everything that you do provide online with a lens towards the question – “Do people really need to know this?” Then, there is an acid test.
In the privacy page, you have the option to see yourself through the eyes of one of your friends. Type the name of one of your friends and see just what they see. In the picture below, you’ll see how my best friend sees me.
If you have a Facebook or other account, you really owe it to yourself to try to determine just how the world sees you. In these days of security, identity theft, cyberbullying, and the lot — not all friends are necessarily friendly.
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Great points. I think it’s important to check out the profile pages closely. Right before my birthday, I started getting Happy Birthday wishes. I went to look at how other saw me, and to my dismay, the year I was born was listed. It’s not that big of a thing, but that was information I didn’t want to share. After all, I’m always 29.
I then checked the rest of my profile page to make sure I wasn’t sharing information I didn’t want shared. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell what is being shared when you fill out the registration form. It’s best to go back and check the profile page after registration. Thanks for the post.
Dear Doug,
Thanks for posting on this important topic. I just reviewed all of my privacy settings and tightened up a few things.
See you around on Twitter!
Betsy Ko