Who is responsible for your privacy online? Facebook or You?

This week in Sydney, Australia, something unspeakable happened and it has again thrown social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace into the spotlight, and not for good reasons.

A Sydney man allegedly lured a young lady to a meeting under the guise that he worked for an animal rescue organisation and was conducting an overnight training camp in the bush south-west of Sydney.

The young lady was to meet the man at a local railway station, she never returned.

This is a terrible tragedy for the young lady’s family and friends and my heart goes out to them. It’s a timely reminder that there are complete nut jobs everywhere – in the street, in dark alleys and, of course, on Facebook.

This latest story has lead to some police, journalists and social commentators laying the blame for this kind of tragedy squarely at the feet of the social networking sites. How those social networking sites handle your private details, and indeed whether they provide a safe and secure environment for people to interact with each other, has again been put into question.

In a poll appearing on the ninemsn website today, the question, “Is Facebook doing enough to keep your information private?” has been answered so far by 77,966 people with (currently) 86% of respondents saying that Facebook is not doing enough.

But what are each of us doing to protect our own privacy on these sites? Particularly on Facebook, do you know how to better protect your identity, your contact details and, in the long run, yourself?

There are a few very simple ways you can take steps to keep your information more private on Facebook:

1. Know what you are participating in.

On Facebook, there are groups, pages, personal profiles, notes and events. You can interact on any of these and when you do, the entire population can see what your interests, opinions and potentially your location is.

As always, if you are in a Facebook group or writing a post or review on a Facebook page, and someone from that community contacts you directly through the site, exercise caution if they are asking to meet you in person and don’t give too much away about yourself to them.

2. Don’t be an ‘over-sharer’.

How many times have you seen somebody post something on Facebook and thought, “Geez, why would you tell the whole world that?”

Status updates about relationship changes, employment situations and other personal issues should always be vetted by asking yourself first if you would tell your Mum this. I know that sounds simplistic but if you are about to put something on Facebook that you wouldn’t want your Mum to read, don’t do it.

3. Have a look at your contact information.

Facebook has the facility to make your contact information only available to certain contact. This information includes your phone number and email address. To make this information more private:

* Click on Account in the top right hand corner of your Facebook profile

* From the dropdown menu, click on Privacy Settings

* Click on Contact Information

To protect your email address for instance, go down to the section where your email address is and there will be a dropdown menu that contains the choices: Everyone, Friends of Friends, Friends Only and Customise. Choose the one which is most appropriate for you.

If you choose Customise, you can then decide which specific contacts can see your information and, importantly, which specific contacts cannot. Likewise, you can set your profile so that only you can see them.

Of course, it could also be argued that if the only people you want to see your contact details are your close and trusted friends, wouldn’t they already have that information?

4. Don’t let your dodgy friends make you look bad.

If you have a very separate business life to your personal life, and if you use your Facebook profile sometimes for business-related posts or updates, you can also restrict which contacts can post things to your Wall, and also whether your Wall is even visible to everyone.

* Click on Account in the top right hand corner of your Facebook profile

* From the dropdown menu, click on Privacy Settings

* Click on Personal Information and Posts

Third from the bottom you can check or uncheck the section that reads, “Allow friends to posts on my wall” and the immediately under that, in the “Posts by friends” section, you can control who sees what your friends write on your profile.

5. Don’t let people identify you in dodgy photos.

A client of mine has a pretty conservative small business with a VERY conversative, older clientele. They were putting on a new staff member and had gotten the potential candidates down to two. Both were similarly experienced, educated and both presented very well in interview.

Just before they made the decision, they checked the two girls’ Facebook profiles. One had very little information available to people, had no questionable photos and no status updates that gave anything away about what she did away from work.

The other profile had some photos of the candidate while she was in Bali. The photos were mostly innocent except a few that were the candidate scantily-clad (and in one photo topless) doing Tequila lay-backs in a bar in Kuta. The trip by the way, wasn’t a holiday, but was a familiarisation trip paid for by her current employer.

Oops. No prize for guessing which candidate got the job.

The lesson of that is you can either stop people from seeing any content from anyone other than you, or you can un-tag any photos that you don’t want everyone to see when they appear in your feed.

6. Use friend lists.

This is a highly under-utilised feature of Facebook profiles. The lists allow you to group people together in different combinations like family, school friends, workmates and so on. The beauty of doing this is that you can assign different privacy rules to each group. It’s also important to remember that you can certain people to more than one group.

To set up a friends list, go to the Friends section of your profile when you are already signed in to Facebook. At the top of your list of friends, click on “Create new list”. Call the list whatever you want, select which of your friends you want to put in the new group and that’s it.

7. Use some common sense.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the young lady who fell victim to the predator in Sydney this week was entirely at fault. Some very bad people can be very charming and convincing.

I just mean that if you don’t know someone personally, knowing them on Facebook is NOT the same thing. Don’t give anyone any information about yourself, your family and friends, how you can be contacted or anything else which will help someone get in touch with you or meet you in person unless you really know that person in real life.

The best rule of thumb? If you feel a bit anxious or unsure about someone you have met on Facebook, you could be right so back yourself. If you turn out to be wrong, you have lost nothing.

If you would like to find out how you can protect your business’ brand, corporate identity or how you can help your employees or subscribers protect their own information better on Facebook, call me TODAY on 02 4324 2594.

Do you have any other suggestions for my readers to better protect themselves on social networking sites? Let us know in the comments.

Tagged as: Facebook, Facebook Pages