Social Networking Safety

Social networking is the big thing these days. Almost everyone is on Facebook, MySpace and/or Twitter. These sites bring old friends together, help us make new ones, keep families in touch and can even help us find work. But they can also be a nightmare as recent news stories have shown. One woman, who was about to graduate college with a teaching degree had that degree revoked after she posted photos of herself drinking and partying on her Facebook page, and the wife of the new head of M16, the UK’s version of the CIA, had her Facebook page deleted after posting family pics and locations on it for everyone to see.

There is an important lesson to be learned here. Unless you protect your tweets, Facebook, and MySpace pages, anyone will be able to see them. If you are one of the many who are searching for employment these days, you can pretty much be assured that potential employers will be searching for you, so think twice about bashing your former boss or posting a racy pic-even protecting your tweets won’t keep your friends from re-tweeting them.

The same holds true for your MySpace and Facebook page. Unless you use the privacy settings anyone who does a simple Google search or a search on each site will be able to see everything. Facebook’s new personalized URLs make that even easier. I have my pages set so only friends can see what I post. Anyone not my friend gets a very simple page that provides little info and prompts them to sign up and/or send me a friend request. I find this setting adequate. There is even a deeper setting for Facebook where you can completely block your profile, including your photo and even make yourself unclickable when you leave comments on other people’s pages. I find this to be overkill as it makes you come across and very cold and unfriendly. MySpace’s new Profile 2.0 lets you decide exactly what content you want public and which you want to restrict to just friends.

Of course none of these privacy tools will work if you are careless about who you accept as a friend/follower. On Twitter, never automatically follow people that follow/request to follow you. Take the time to check them out. On Facebook, quality is far better than quantity. My rule of thumb is not to accept friend requests from people I don’t know (unless we share a mutual friend) if they don’t include a note telling me who they are. As with Twitter, take the time to check people out. Same rule goes for MySpace.

Social networking is a valuable tool and great fun too, but learn how to do it safely!