First Things First, Your Safety Online

Here are some tips to keep you safe on line. While the world is becoming increasingly transparent, you are still in charge of your privacy levels.

First:
Be wary of quizzes and games. They’re fun, and seeing how you stack up against your friends is a big ego boost, but it’s amazing the amount of information they can gather as part of their terms of service.

When you sign up for a quiz, typically a notice pops up to declare that interacting with the application requires opening access to information such as: "access will let [the application] pull your profile information, photos, your friends' info, and other content that it requires to work." Pretty broad rights.

Be sure to use the privacy options on Facebook. They provide very granular privacy tools that are useful to spend some time reviewing. Start by dividing your friends into separate lists. You might consider creating lists for ‘work’, ‘good friends’, ‘family’, ‘clients’, etc.Once you’ve created your lists, go through your friends and add them to the appropriate list. Friends can be on more than one list or none of them. Your friends are not able to see how they have been sorted.

Once you have sorted your friends, click on settings in the upper right corner and then on privacy settings. There are many areas of Facebook where you can control what you chose to share. Let’s start with Profile. You can edit many portions of your information here so that it is visible from everyone to no one but yourself. If you have used the list function to sort your friends you can also exclude certain lists from having access. So if you don’t want your coworkers to see photos that your friends might post, you could exclude everyone you listed in ‘work’. The granularity is pretty extreme and appears to be getting even more so. Facebook also give you a link on the page to view your profile as one of your friends will see it. This is a nice way to test if your changes are going to have the desired effect. Here is a quick YouTube video that shows how to set up lists and set privacy.

I want to spare you from the experience of the person that bashed their employer on Facebook, forgetting they were in their network... "your fired" posted on their wall right after they finished their rant!

Peace and competence,
Terry