4 Social Networks You Haven’t Setup Your Privacy Settings For (And You Should)
When privacy settings are concerned, our minds tent to automatically switch to Facebook, and who can blame us? It’s the biggest social network around, catering to billions, and it has changed its privacy policies so many times that we have collectively developed a pavlovian reflex. However, you do have a profile on one or numerous other networks, so don’t forget about them either! Owning your data means owning them on every service, not just the biggest one.
Facebook’s photo-oriented child is an open network and your account is public by default. This means that your username and photos can be seen by anyone, as well as your name and bio, if yo chose to provide one.
What’s public? Your images may appear in search results in the app, by viewing your profike, searching through hashtags, as well as through third-party apps based on Instagram functionalities. With that in mind, always
What can you do? Turn on “Private Mode,” which allows only your hand-picked followers to view your feed, double check your Facebook sharing settings and block manually random users you do not want to interact with.
This is another open social network, and much more open than Facebook or Instagram – you’re supposed to follow and tweet to perfect strangers, actually.
What’s public? Everything! Your name, username, profile picture, bio, location, number of followers, tweets and favourites… Everything with the exception of your email address and your direct messages.
What can you do? If you don’t want the publicity, switch on the Protect My Tweets option to limit your tweets to just those that you yourself follow, disable the geo.tagging to keep your location out of your tweets and uncheck the options that allow other users to find you via email address or phone number and keep track of the apps you’ve allowed access to your Twitter account via Twitter login or any other way.
You’ve pretty much got the hang of it – most of the popular social networks are open, and Pinterest is no different.
What’s public? Pinterest boards and profiles are public by default so anyone can browse through the images and articles you’ve pinned . Your profile page, name, profile picture, followers, following and favourites are public as well, and all Pinterest profiles are listed on Google
What can you do? You can hide your profile from searches, and create private board – note that you can only make a board private when you first create it and you cannot turn a public board into a private one.
LinkedIn is actually a closed social network – that’s a new one!
What’s public? Your whole profile is pretty much public by default, like a very open CV, which is not necessarily a bad thing (keep it tidy and updated, though!) LinkedIn also lets users know when you’ve viewed their profile, so no stalking like you do on Facebook! Your photo, new connections, companies you’re following, likes will always be public. Your profile is also always be available for LinkedIn search.
What can you do? You can opt for a private profile, where full information is available only after you’ve accepted someone as a connection, and you can chose to send out notifications when you make changes to your profile or to withhold them.
If you need a few more tips on online privacy and owning your personal data, you can read more about it on our blog.
