What recommendations would I personally make to people on how they use social media and the settings they choose. Please remember that any application that is free has issues on your privacy, its how they make money. If it were truly free then it would not be able to exist.
So today all the news channels are full of reports of problems with social media and your personal information. Now everyone involved in Fraud Prevention or any other type of cyber or personal security will have been telling people for years that social media could be a potential problem. I believe that the current Facebook news story will either disappear as interest moves on or the issue will spread to all social media platforms and possibly to other areas such as loyalty cards.
For a long time now employers have been looking at the social media of job applicants or those already employed in their organisations even if they say this isn’t the case. However a large number of people have been willingly sharing lots of information that they would not other wise share. I know someone who always announces they are going on holiday, even counting down the days publicly and then putting pictures of them at the airport and enjoying their holiday. Social media marketing gurus such as Gary Vaynerchuk will say this is not an issue and in the future people will openly share a lot more of their information, however he also talks a lot about how to market to people using social. Now to market to people effectively you need to know as much as possible about them. This is great for the consumer and the seller as you get adverts that are targeted to you and specifically address topics you are interested in. For instance using Google and I am sure most of you know this already, you can place code on your sales site that will show adverts to those people who visited your site but didn’t buy, so as they browse the web they will still see adverts from your site.
Do not rely on the data protection regulations or the start of GDPR to ensure that you settings are as you like. Take action but action that suits you and the way you use social media. Remember that this applies to everything not just Facebook, Whatsapp, twitter, Instagram etc etc. I advise everyone to take responsibility for their own data as much as possible, do not rely on a commercial company to ensure your data safety.
Remember to remain completely secure from Fraud and other such problems you would need to be completely off the grid, most things you do in the modern world track you in some way be it your credit card your phone usage, social media or supermarket loyalty card.
Firstly what do you want to share and why but assume anything you share is then public. We have all recently seen people in the public eye including celebrities and politicians be in trouble for tweets or posts they made years ago or to a friend.
Just because you share it with one person does not mean that they may not share it or it becomes available by some other means. Personally I like people to wish me happy birthday and I am vain enough to want a lot of people to do so, that creates a risk but its a risk I know of so thats fine, the way I have this set in Facebook is to show the day but not year giving partial security but it is a risk.
To discover your information on Facebook do the following
Logon
Go to top right by the ? there is a down button click that
Go to settings
Click Ads
Click on Your interests – scroll along the buttons including the far right MORE option to see what is currently there stored
If you wish to change your settings go to Your Information and change the selections. Then go to Ad Settings and change the selections
Close the advertising section and then go to Apps and see which Apps you have given access to your Facebook, deselect any you do not want such as quizzes etc
Then Go to the Privacy section and make the changes on your profile that you want.
Finally go to the Security section and see where you logged in and make sure it ties up with what you think it should be and then scroll down and select the option to Get alerts about unrecognised logins
Finally scroll down the page to see recent emails from Facebook and make sure you see what you expect
