WhatsTheBuzzAbout.com

Maintaining Privacy

You may be impressed with the social networks which permit you to select privacy settings, and particularly impressed with those which seem to permit you to be selective regarding various pieces of information. You may also appreciate those sites which attempt to authenticate their subscribers and verify information through email confirmation or other methods.  All of those special features are important and do make a difference.

Even though sites will permit certain restrictions, you should still be extremely careful  about establishing your privacy settings. Some sites will not enable your membership information to be accessed thus restricting your private information to just that site. Clear examples of that would be alumni groups from some of the top strategic consulting firms. Others will permit just member information to be available and nothing else.  Clear examples of that would be members of certain blogging sites.  Other sites permit a variety of controls over certain parts of your data and complete lack of control over other parts.  Clear examples of that include some of the more commonly-used social networks where you are shown as having an account but can control who can access more detailed information, such as date of birth, employer, etc.

You may find that you want to participate in a certain site and you will have to forgo protecting what you may consider confidential information to join that network. You may want to be more selective about what you choose to share on an item-by-item basis and find that such distinctions are not possible. For example, you may want to share an employer name but not the full dates of your employment or only the day and month of your birth and not the year (particularly helpful for younger children). 

Sometimes cancelling membership wipes out the retention of data by that social network and sometimes it does not. As long as the data remains,  it is subject to release, either inadvertently or proactively. Regardless, once the data is picked up by a search engine, it is extremely difficult to retract.

Releasing private information to friends and colleagues through email is also risky. Data once captured electronically via any medium has the potential to have a long life span and an ability to be retrieved years from then. This data includes photos, emails, text messages, voice mails, postings, video, searches you have conducted, video camera tapes, etc.

Each keystroke is important and has implications. If you are not comfortable with having the information public, don’t write it, don’t email it, don’t leave a voice mail, don’t text it, don’t speak it, and do conduct yourself with dignity in public gatherings where video cameras and cell phone cameras are a way of life.

Privacy was a very sacred tenet, highly guarded, As technology moves forward, our privacy rights have retreated. We are subject to surveillance in actions and speech and writing.  It doesn’t matter if you are a stellar citizen and human being–all “men” are created equal when it comes to this concept.  Parents need to instill in their children an understanding of privacy in order that children are not “embarrassed” later by their actions.

Think of your actions as always being public and it will help you make decisions regarding your privacy settings on sites and your conduct on and off-line.

What is your buzz about?