Ways to Protect Your Privacy on Social Networking Websites Like Facebook

Social media networking has become an integral part of our digital lifestyle. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter or Frienster, you’ll have to constantly bear in mind that these sites do not protect your personal privacy. As such, you should be really careful when sharing photo albums, personally identifiable information such as names, academic information, employment history, and locations as it may lead to implications if they fall into the wrong hands. Follow the steps below and they may help to keep you safe and secure.

Always be mindful by using your privacy settings on Facebook – This should be the simplest way to protect yourself. Ensure that you set your privacy so that only the “friends that you have added or accepted” (genuine friends) are able to view your profile. Believe me, this is really important as it has happened to me – it prevents perverts from tracing your activites on facebook. Though this is not the be-all, end-all security measure, it will help to a certain extent nonetheless. As we all know, social networking sites are just as hack-able as any other sites around, so you should always beef up security whenever possible.

Be password-savvy – When you are coming up with a secure password, do not choose things like your birthday, your child’s name or anything that others can easily guessed. Always make sure that you have a good mix of lower and upper case letters, numbers and symbols. The best is to keep it longer than eight characters. It is also highly advisable to change your password at least once every three months. It seems troublesome, but it will save you from unnecessary trouble.

Use different usernames and passwords – Usernames and passwords should be kept separate for different websites such as social networks, online banking, email and online shopping. These days, having distinct passwords is just not enough. By having the same username across different websites, your entire personal, romantic, professional and e-commerce life can be mapped and re-created with some simple algorithms. Again, this has happened before.

Do not let apps and programmes tag your location – You may not be aware, but apps and programmes such as Google Latitude and Foursquare are frequently tagging your location. At this point, we may not know the full privacy implications of these services, but we should be thoughtful about how we use their features. You wouldn’t want others to know where you stay. And do turn off the geo-location on your smartphone if you do not know what it is. As a first rule, we should never allow third parties to collect information about us without knowing how the information is being collected and what is being collected.

You may want to De-Google yourself – Social media sites like Facebook are extremely search engine friendly. This means that your information is ranked by the search engines. You should uncheck the option to be indexed by the search engines in your privacy settings for added security. You can turn off your public search listing in Facebook by simply unchecking the “enable public search” box in the “games and websites” section under your account page.

Make full use of your privacy settings on social networks – With so many changes, privacy settings are getting harder to follow each time but we should stay on top of them. Check out http://www.privacydefender.net, which is a free service that lets you fix your privacy settings in Facebook in two mouse clicks.

Remember to block cookies on your web browser – This is the general rule when you surf the internet from your computer besides Facebooking and Tweeting. When you surf, the sites you have visited will collect hundreds of data points off your computer. These data get mashed together to form an integral part of your digital profile, which is then sold to companies around the world without your consent. Blocking cookies will help to prevent some of the data collection about you. Though you’ll have to enter passwords more often, it is definitely a smarter and safer way to surf.

Use your common sense which is your best defense – When using social media networks such as Facebook, Friendster and Twitter, common sense is the most vital tool. There are two key risks that you need to consider – do not enter your home or even office address, telephone numbers, work information, etc on your Facebook or Tweets and do not post ill-considered messages on Facebook as they have cost people their jobs.

So to everyone out there, happy surfing and most importantly, surf in a smart way!