Pri­vacy in Social Media

6 Comments so far

1.    John Cavanaugh on January 26, 2010 3:13 pm      Reply

   Lee-Ann:

   You are ask­ing the right ques­tions. My fear is that 99.9% of the pub­lic are not ask­ing these ques­tions at all. They are tak­ing what­ever they are given and not think­ing about it. And there is a LOT to think about!

   I write about some of these issues in my blog as well:

   http://thetaptaptap.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/pardon-me%E2%80%A6your-wall-is-showing/

   Thanks for your post!

   - John

2.    Greg Satell on January 26, 2010 2:54 pm      Reply

   Lee-Ann,

   Absolutely. Just because every­body can be con­nected doesn’t mean that we want to be. I keep my face­book fairly pri­vate. There’s a limit to how much of myself I want out there.

   - Greg

3.    Gillian on January 25, 2010 8:48 pm      Reply

   I think a lot of peo­ple are start­ing to get con­cerned about pri­vacy. I give talks on social media for busi­ness and in fact have just fin­ished a pre­sen­ta­tion I am giv­ing to some mem­bers of the Réseau des femmes d’affaires de Québec next month on using social media securely.

4.    Mark Howe on January 25, 2010 2:27 pm      Reply

   One of the lawyers at our firm (TDS) who has a back­ground in tech­nol­ogy law and pri­vacy mat­ters is doing a pre­sen­ta­tion next month on this very topic to mem­bers of the Cana­dian Mar­ket­ing Asso­ci­a­tion (Man­i­toba Chapter).

   http://www.cmamanitoba.com/

   Mark

5.    Lee on January 25, 2010 12:29 pm      Reply

   Hi RJ

   That is a scary story. And that is what wor­ries me. We can never take a “that won’t hap­pen to me” attitude.

   I agree I think we need to be care­ful about what we share about our per­sonal and pri­vate lives, but be open with our pro­fes­sional lives, in that we share views, help oth­ers, make con­tacts and do business.

   That is inter­est­ing. I never wor­ried too much about Linkedin because it was more busi­ness ori­en­tated and more lim­ited in the infor­ma­tion avail­able. I know you can hide your con­tacts. In your case more pri­vacy is a real con­cern and I cer­tainly believe pri­vacy should be a higher pri­or­ity on their list.

6.    RJ on January 25, 2010 12:08 pm      Reply

   Hi Lee-Ann,

   I’ve had the same con­cerns as you for a while now, when I first started using social net­works I’m ashamed to admit that pri­vacy didn’t even occur to me! I was so swept up in the whole idea the seri­ous­ness was lost under all the enthu­si­asm. I have since learnt the hard way though, hav­ing kept a fairly open pro­file I was, unbe­known to me, allow­ing some­one I knew to ‘cyber-stalk’ me, it was only when I started receiv­ing abu­sive mes­sages men­tion­ing my where-abouts that I started to really take stock. Fol­low­ing on from a court injunc­tion and many months of worry, I now make sure my pro­file is com­pletely pri­vate and am very selec­tive about who I add or accept as friends, and deny all applications.

   Whilst I agree that this has restricted my use of the net­work, I also don’t feel like I’ve lost any­thing by doing it, I con­sider my face­book account to be an addi­tional means to stay in touch with my friends and share expe­ri­ences with the peo­ple I know. I don’t use it for busi­ness net­work­ing purposes.

   I do how­ever use LinkedIn for net­work­ing, in fact I would say I spend more time on LinkedIn than I do face­book. I recently started receiv­ing noti­fi­ca­tions through Linkedin that the same chap I men­tioned ear­lier was now using this net­work — I’m assum­ing I was noti­fied because his email address was in my address book. Instantly the panic started to rise, him hav­ing access to my busi­ness con­tacts was the last thing I wanted! I’d never even looked into the pri­vacy set­tings of LinkedIn before but when I finally did I dis­cov­ered… there are none! Or very, very few, I couldn’t for exam­ple, block this guy from see­ing my pro­file. I con­tacted LinkedIn to see if block­ing him would be pos­si­ble and the answer was no, but that they could review his account, the guy hasn’t done any­thing – yet, though so he hasn’t vio­lated any poli­cies. Now I’m faced with the choice do I aban­don my pro­file that has helped me pro­fes­sion­ally a huge amount, or do I run the risk and hope for the best?

   So, in answer to your ques­tion I think it’s very unwise to reveal the ‘whole’ you on a social net­work, they each serve dif­fer­ent pur­poses – Face­book is more for friends, so make it pri­vate and be selec­tive who you allow in, and LinkedIn is for busi­ness, stick to con­tent you wouldn’t mind your clients see­ing and all should be ok.