Protect privacy on social media

Would you give away your best client's personal contact information to a spammer or identity thief? If you are not actively protecting your client and personal contact lists on social media sites, you may be doing exactly that.

A couple of days ago, I used Facebook to ask a friend to give me a call. I included my office phone number. Later in the day, I received a note from another Facebook friend who must have seen the note on my Facebook Wall. My friend warned me: "Don't ever post your phone number on your wall. You'll get inundated with marketing calls."

I can certainly understand not posting your personal phone number on your public feed on Twitter, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of followers. On the other hand, my profile page shouldn't be an issue. After all, don't I control who sees what on those pages?

Here's the problem: When I send a message to someone else on any of the social media sites and include private information such as my direct phone number, pictures or other personal data, that person may not be as diligent about protecting their data as I am.

Part of the issue is data mining. A host of companies are doing this, including Google. Data mining can be fairly innocuous -- the site may be collecting information about users so it can better serve them. In most cases, however, this is not the case. Your personal data is quite valuable to advertisers. Many of the fun games on Facebook are nothing more than data-mining schemes.

Data mining can be dangerous. For example, when you sign up to play a game on Facebook, the application invites you to share your game results with your friends. As soon as you broadcast your results, you have handed over your database information to a third party.

I recently received a request to become the fan of an application that would tell me how many people had visited my Facebook profile page. The catch? I had to provide this company with access to all of my friends' data.

There are constant stories in the news about how various databases have been attacked by hackers. In fact, Google recently suffered a major attack from Chinese hackers. Banks are constant targets as well. If your personal data is compromised, it can lead to identity theft, credit-card issues, or even put your home and personal safety at risk.

What can you do to protect your privacy? Here are some tips.

1. Set your Facebook privacy settings to the maximum level you can tolerate
Facebook has recently improved its privacy settings. You can set up your profile to control who sees what parts of your profile. Again, the challenge is whether the people on your friends' list will be as diligent about protecting your data as you are. By limiting who has access to your personal information, you can limit your exposure. ...CONTINUED

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