Guidelines For Safer Social Media Sharing

It's no secret that the Internet is a way to get a lot of information out to a wide audience. It's also a great way to share with friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, and total strangers should you choose, the goings on in your life. However, the more you share, the higher risk of compromising your privacy and becoming a victim of identity theft. Keep a few tips in mind to lower your risk when engaging in social media sharing:

1. Don't accept invitations from strangers. It's always better to find out who the person is that wants to know you before clicking the accept button. If he or she is a friend of a friend, verify their relationship first with your friend. Many people accept all invitations to connect and not everyone is on the up and up.

2. Don't click on links, even if they appear to be from friends. Social media is the candy store to the preverbal kid. Often those links are placed on a friend's page or site without the knowledge of your friend and often they end up being scams or malware.

3. Check your privacy settings to make sure you are sharing only what you want others to know. Check them again every time you get a notice that there was an update.

4. Don't share personal information that you don't want everyone else to know. Never ever share sensitive information such as your social security number, home address, driver's license number, etc.

5. Close accounts you are no longer actively using. If you can't close it completely, delete as many personal details as possible and deactivate it.

6. Change passwords often. Most security professionals recommend doing this at least quarterly. Use strong words and phrases that no one is likely to guess or that do not exist in the dictionary. The longer, the better.

7. Turn off the GPS functionality on your smartphone camera. It will pinpoint precisely where you are and were, which can be fun, but it's a security risk. Keep your whereabouts private and turn that off.

8. While you are disabling, do just that for the automatic login features of your social media sites, especially on mobile devices. If your device gets stolen or someone gets access to it, your social media sites might be compromised.

9. Reconsider posting your Twitter comment or Instagram pictures to Facebook, or vice versa, through Twitter or Instagram. Sharing that way gets your information out there faster and attaches it to more sites. Most of those sites allow you to choose to shut off the automatic sharing features.

10. And the most important guideline for social media is to consider everything you post to any social media site to be permanent. Just because you disable an account, doesn't mean your presence there is gone. If others share something you said or did, or you are tagged in a friend's photo, you cannot delete it. 

As always, read the terms of use and privacy policies of any site you join. If you don't agree with how your information will be used, don't sign up or delete your account.