Fresh Chat

I’m the first to admit I’m totally addicted to social networks and online communities, when I talk to friends and family about my online involvement, they often worry that I have such a heavy online presence that anyone can discover all my dirty little secrets (not that I have any, of course). My mum told me a story of a friend’s daughter who didn’t get a job she applied for because the prospective employer did a search for her online and found her Facebook profile, which contained details they weren’t happy with (i.e. photos of her partying, when she was applying for a teaching position).

The fact is, these are unneccessary fears, most social networks have very comprehensive security and privacy settings. I’d like to use Facebook as an example of the security you can apply to your online presence.

Firstly, in regards to the story above the easiest way to keep your profile private is to ensure that your privacy settings restrict who can view your profile. The options include: My Networks & Friends, Friends of Friends and Only Friends. If you’re a member of the ‘Australia’ Network and you choose the My Networks & Friends options, there are 2.5 millions Australians who can see your whole profile. You can also choose whether or not you’d like your profile to appear in public searches (eg. Google).

It’s also important to check the settings for photos and videos when managing your profile, for example, do you want everyone to be able to see any photos or videos tagged of you? If not, change the settings. When creating photo albums on Facebook, the automatic privacy setting is ‘Everyone’ this doesn’t just mean all of your friends, it means EVERYONE on Facebook. I always change the setting to Only Friends so that only people I know have access to my photos.

Facebook has the option of creating Friends groups, so you can choose to have a ‘personal’ and ‘work’ group and limit what information is available to your colleagues. For example, you can restrict colleagues from being able to read your wall posts and seeing your photos.

There are endless privacy and security settings on Facebook, and all other social networks and online communities. As you add information to your profile think about who that information is available to and ensure your privacy is protected.