Social Media and Privacy Settings

Lindsey Robbins — Fri, 15 May 2009 13:04:00 GMT

Lately, when something hasn’t been working, in between projects, or waiting for edits, I decided to try a little experiment. I wanted to see what would happen if I played with my privacy settings on some social media sites like myspace, facebook, flickr, and more. While it did make me uncomfortable because it is after all, my privacy, I wondered if the value of transparency outweighed my need to protect my own information. Which, if you think about it, is rather silly because anything you put online has no real privacy - it’s online! If you don't want something to be shared (or misused), don't use the internet! I'm one of those believers that anything can be hacked.

What does this mean for your information? Your profiles? Your social media efforts? Your organization's information?

I can't give you the answer, I can only help you question yourself and figure out the answer on your own. Because after all, the more we learn about the terms of agreement of social media websites, the better educated you are to know what you should and shouldn’t share online. When does your content suddenly become not yours? And, when does your privacy cease to be private?

What did I learn from my privacy experiment?

I had one random person contact me based on making my profile more available... Hmmm my content must not be that appealing. Lesson Learned - Transparency doesn't mean people will flock to you.
Instead, it just meant I had no clue who was seeing my information. They didn't have to ask permission first. Lesson Learned – Unless you have an analytics tool like Google Analytics, open content doesn’t yield you much insight into your users.
If you have too tight rules around privacy, it will be hard for people to find you. Lesson Learned – Make it easy for people to find and connect with you. Once they do, you can work on making the connections more meaningful.
There are so many settings you have control over on social media sites like Facebook. Lesson Learned – Take some time to browse through the settings, read the help information available, and play with what settings work for your organization. I found it’s nice to have different privacy settings on different sites depending on the content available. On a site like Facebook where I connect with family and friends in addition to my professional work, it’s nice to have more privacy.

Maybe my overall lesson learned however is that it’s easy to set custom privacy settings. However, the unsettling part is deciding what content to share and what settings work best. Never put content online you wouldn’t want the whole world to see even if it’s “private.”

Chatterbox : privacy

Social Media and Privacy Settings