Privacy in the Social Media Age

What you’ll discover:

Personal information security
Controlling your viewing audience
Protecting your company’s data

A frightening occurrence every now and then reminds us how exposed we are to intrusions of our privacy in the age of social media. One of the most apparent instances is the crisis in which Facebook was accused of enabling Cambridge Analytica to access personal data. It’s easy to feel at ease on social media networks with millions of members, but that ease may lead to deadly complacency. Let’s take a look at how to identify the hidden hazards of personal social media use, how to reduce those risks via smart privacy decisions, and how to defend your company from social media weaknesses.

Personal information security

Users of social networking sites must unavoidably establish profiles that contain certain personal information such as phone numbers, email addresses, job title and employer, education and school, location, and relationship statuses. If you wish to utilize the platform, you must build a trusting relationship with the social media provider. Recent occurrences have shown that providers, whether intentionally or unintentionally, may betray that trust. With that in mind, here are a few precautions you may take to safeguard your personal information.

Some social media users respond by deactivating their accounts completely. But, you may safeguard essential aspects of your online privacy by opting out of the platform’s API and barring information from flowing to and from third-party applications. This is often done via your account settings on each site. You may also be able to control which applications have access to certain regions of your personal data. These measures might help you minimize the quantity of information you make accessible to other companies and organizations.

Controlling your viewing audience

Keeping your personal and financial information out of the hands of prying eyes isn’t the only part of social media privacy to consider. Today’s multimedia self-publishing platforms invite you to share your ideas, views, beliefs, and daily activities.

It’s difficult to resist the urge to share information with people on social media—but do you really want that information available to everyone? Eleven percent of the population admits to sharing material on social media that they subsequently regret. Railing against your boss, for example, may get you fired or land you in a defamation action, while uploading a photo of your new debit card could result in illegal expenditures. When you’re looking for that ideal job, blatantly unprofessional conduct published online may close the doors, and even little facts about your everyday life may supply thieves or blackmailers with lots of useful information.

Instead of keeping your social media platform of choice “open,” look at the degrees of permission the platform provides and utilize those levels. Put strict limits on which persons and organizations may see certain postings. There’s no reason why your family, employer, and church members should all have access to the same information.

Protecting your company’s data

Whether your company uses social media platforms, accounts, or channels, you must apply many of the same privacy practices to your whole staff that you would as an individual. Note that any social media postings made on a corporate account may subject the firm to liability.

How can you keep your company’s social media privacy under control? A Social Media Policy is a good idea whether or not your company has an online presence. A policy may assist you in defining the terms, regulations, and permissible usage of this technology with your personnel. You may use a Social Media Policy to:

Set standards for how corporate personnel should use social media.
Monitor or monitor how your workers communicate about your firm on the internet.
Restrict employees from misusing social media in relation to your firm and its commercial objectives.
When workers or service providers handle your social media accounts, keep your connections on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.