How to protect your privacy when using Social Media Networks

Do you know that only 38% of you know how to limit or customize the content you share on Social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn?. This number which is even less than half of the total users is a good indicator which shows the unawareness of the users about their privacy and its protection.

Therefore today I am going to talk about few tips which are going to help you to protect your privacy when using social media.

1.One common mistake we do is not reading the privacy policies produced by the sites. If we spend two three minutes on reading the privacy policies we can get a clear understanding about the following areas.

• What is the scope covered by the privacy policy?
• What kind of information they collect? 
• For what type of information they have access to?
• How long they are going to keep the information we provided?
•  How can we contact them regarding any concerns on violation of our privacy?  
  But just like the terms and conditions, we never read the privacy policy. So we don’t have a proper understanding about the above factors. Therefore my advice for you is to read the privacy policy before you provide your sensitive information. 

2. Another main and one of the most important things is what are the devices you use to share your information through social media. If you always use your personal computer or your mobile for browsing the internet, up to some extent it guarantees your privacy. But if you use public places and networks for social networking it is pretty easy for someone to access your information. Therefore you should be very concerned about the additional gadgets that are plugged into those public devices and also to delete your browsing history including the cache and the offline data.

 

3. Minimize interaction with third party applications. For example we can take the thousands of apps used in social networking. But not all these apps are created by Facebook. Some are third party apps. Therefore if you have at least a little doubt about the content and the amount of information the app requires, it is better not to install the app at all rather than risking your privacy.

4. Be concerned about the posts that you are tagged in. Again this is also a very important area because we tend to ignore this as a threat and we might think this is harmless since one of our friends tags us in that post. But have you ever thought that those posts are visible to friends of your friends who are not even in your friend list. Even if you always customize your posts and make it visible to only selected people, without your knowledge your posts will be visible to strangers. So it is really important to review your tags before adding it to your profiles and if you think it is not appropriate, don’t think twice to untag yourself.

5. And you will also have to be concerned about the privacy settings of your friends. When you customize your posts to only a few of your friends and if they are not maintaining good privacy settings, your posts can be viewed by outside parties.

Next time you browse internet or use social media, remember these tips and try to protect your privacy because leakages of those sensitive information can even destroy your whole image.