The Social media privacy has come into scrutiny countless times, personal information has been compromised so many times, identities have been stolen, pictures have been copied and sensitive data have been hacked. How safe is the social media? How can one stay safe while using it?
These are the questions that go through my mind every time I am on the social networks; I always ask myself how can I stay safe while using social media? How can I ensure maximum privacy for my account? Social media networks are designed to make it easy for people connect and socialize and often come with its default privacy settings wide open. Many people go on using the networks with such default settings without adjusting them to suit their personal needs.
To ensure maximum privacy in the social networks one has to customize the privacy settings, note they may vary in the different social networks. But often times they are placed in places where you can find them easily. When you find it, the most important settings are the ones that protect your profile as thus;
Who can see the content you shared;
Who can contact you;
Who can find you;
Who can see the pictures you shared;
Which applications can access your information/data;
Who can tag you on pictures or posts
Who can post on your timeline etc
Social Media Privacy
To ensure maximum social media privacy one should be cautious of the information shared because like I always say, you are responsible for your own privacy, carefully choose your privacy settings. Contents you share in the form of photos can be copied and shared in other places you can’t control.
Be mindful of the comments and updates/tweets you make on the social media as it is now part of job hiring tricks by employers. You do not want to lose your dream job because you made a negative comment about your employer.
The social media privacy allows you to choose what to show to the general public and what to show to only your trusted friends. Simply review your social media accounts today and see what information is public and adjust your privacy settings to suit you properly.
Same goes with applications you have granted access to your profile, review such apps now and disable the ones you don’t find useful anymore as apps have been known to steal and give away your information to third-parties. Only allow trusted apps to access your profile.
Conclusion:
Have in mind that one cannot be safe enough on social media networks but a well protected account will be hard to steal from. So always ensure a maximum social media privacy to keep yourself and your friends safe. Be mindful of what you share on these networks so as not to give away to much information. Only accept people you know as friends and allow only apps you trust to access your account. Note that images shared on social networks are public no matter how you look at them, so do not share sensitive photos or any photo that can bring you problems if in a wrong hand.
Must Read: Private Life: Tuning Your Social Media Life Out to Strangers
Remember to always log out your account especially when you access your social media accounts from a public computer, and don’t fill out any information you do not want to go public.
I hope this article provokes your conscience to go back and review your social media privacy settings to ensure maximum protection. Use the comment form below to share your views or drop your contribution. Remember to subscribe to my RSS feed.
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The project analyzes the privacy policies of more than20 popular social media services and provides a plainly worded description of what you can expect from them concerning the following topics:
This is a great call for concern. Privacy are mostly comprise and thanks for bringing this up.
Thanks for leaving a comment.
Thanks for your comment Emmanuel, glad you found it interesting.
Yeah you are right social media privacy has become very important especially after the launch of Facebook’s Graph Search….We need to stay safe indeed…..Sometimes we provide our confidential data to social medias without knowing the after effects of it….thanks for writing this article in order to make all of those people aware of their mistakes…..
Thanks for your wonderful contribution.
Social media and privacy is definitely very difficult. Social networks enriches sharing and more you share more you risk your privacy.
There are sufficient tools provided in each social site but very few people are aware of the settings and what’s recommended. Spreading awareness will help them to learn and use their account safely.
In my case I upload only public aspect of me in these sites. I try not to share any personal or private data that I don’t wish to share.
Thanks Suresh for your contribution, keeping the private life private and public life public matters alot especially in this era of social media.
Thorough breakdown here buddy, I like how you laid out the social privacy issue.
I never allow too many third party apps to access my account; sometimes I do less social sharing because of this but that is OK by me. Losing track of 3rd party apps you grant access to can put your personal information out there, for the consumption of people you DO NOT want contacting you.
Thanks for sharing!
Thank Ryan for your contribution, do have a great weekend.
This is really awesome. Staying safe on social media networks can be a challenging task, but thanks anyway for this article well written. Thumbs up Nwosu.
Hi Nwosu
Privacy on social media really important. People unknowingly provide their private information while registering or editing their social media profiles. We should aware of these.
Yes we should be able to keep our private life private, thanks for your contribution.
Thanks and am glad you found the post informative thats what Netmediablog is here for. Thanks for your compliment.
social networking sites can be a lot of fun, but only if you know where to draw the line. One has to have the common sense to draw a line- how much I want to tell about myself publicly and how I want to project myself.
If these basics are not kept in mind, one might have to regret lurking around social networks.
Thanks Ambika for your wonderful contribution.
Hey Nwosu Mavtrevor,
Social media privacy which need to be carefully handled by us already same topic been shared on my blog bcoz many people account been hacked and miss used by sharing nude images , vulgar msgs between nice sharing
Thanks Shameem for your comment.
Social Security is one of the most worried thing for me…I do always concern about that…Learnt many things from your post…:)
Thanks Vivek, we have to enlighten ourselves on the dangers of sharing our personal data/information on the Social networks.
Keeping our identities safe should be on the forefront of all social media users when they are engaged with this digital environment. The social media is crawling with cyber thieves and their sole purpose is to use your personal and individual information to commit crimes against you. We cannot throw caution to the wind here, we have to keep our identities as safe as possible no matter what! Educate yourselves and find out what you can do, in your individual situation, to better protect yourself. Thanks. Here is some good related information http://blog.scoredriven.com/id-guard/identity-theft-social-media-users-at-risk/
Thanks for your contribution
Hey Nwosu,
With each moment each an every social media is upgrading itself for making itself more efficient and user-friendly but also makes it more vulnerable and prone to cyber attacks and crimes.
Thanks a lot for sharing this post.
Regards
Charmie
That is why we must ensure good security for our account and i will always teach people on this blog how to stay safe on Social media websites.