Social Privacy

The Social Media Club of Greenville (SMCGreenville) are hosting their monthly meeting on December 14th at 8am.

Doug Cone of Nullvariable Web Consulting will discuss how to protect your online accounts by going into depth about phishing, security and privacy. Also at the meeting, Russell Tripp of Infusion Web and Videowill do an overview of Google Wave which he went into depth about at the last GreenvilleSMC meeting on December 8th.

Keep an eye out for local technology events from Social Media Club and other local technology related organizations to stay up to date and to socialize with people who use social media!

Image Source: Palm Beach Post

Thought you could post your pictures from the party you went to tonight after you got back to your dorm? Sure, but be beware.

Students at the University of Wisconsin – Lacrosse were convicted of Underage Drinking due to pictures posted on Facebook.

As mentioned in our previous article: “If you don’t want your mom to see it, don’t post it.”

I guess the same thing goes for cops too.

Maximizing privacy settings sometimes seems like the only option and probably is the best option for most. However, consultants and anyone who is looking advertise their skill-set online, they might want to customize what they do make available for the public.

For instance, make selected portions of your profile and person information available, but only allow friends to see things such as Posts, Photos, Videos and Tags.

You can find more information on this in this post by InsideFacebook.com.

It’s becoming evident that using Twitter to express yourself is just about the same as mentioning something in a press conference.

Larry Johnson, who played for the Kansas City Chiefs was released earlier this month as a free agent after bashing the coaching staff and disrespecting a fan on his Twitter account. This action to release Johnson was strongly encouraged by fans as more than 32,000 signed an online petition for his release from the team.

Here are some really good tips for setting up your Facebook Privacy settings. Ben Parr from Mashable.com is interviewed and closes the interview with:

“If you don’t want your mom to see it, don’t post it online.”

Are we entering a new time in which insurance companies are able to deny claims based on Tweets and Facebook pictures?

Yes.

Nathalie Blanchard, a woman from Quebec, Canada was recently dropped from her Manulife health coverage for severe depression because of pictures and messages that were posted on Facebook. Nathalie had been diagnosed with severe depression from her psychiatrist and was recommended to go on extended leave. After a year and a half, her coverage stopped and Nathalie phoned the insurance company to see what was happening. She was told that there were pictures of her at the beach, out with friends and there were status messages of her climbing a mountain. Because of this (and possibly other factors that we are unaware of) it was determined that she was no longer depressed.

Natalie is filing in court to get her coverage back and Tom Lavin, Nathalie’s attorney stated:

“I don’t think for judging a mental state that Facebook is a very good tool,”

“My client was diagnosed with a major depression. And there were pictures of her on Facebook, in a party or having a good time. It could be that she was just trying to escape.”

Manulife did admit that it uses Facebook, however they responded to the CBC stating:

“We would not deny or terminate a valid claim solely based on information published on websites such as Facebook.”

Nathalie was employed by IBM and has been asked to go on leave without pay.

In order to maintain your social privacy, one of the important things to do is to make sure you logout when you use public computers. Just yesterday I went to the Verizon Wireless store to check out the new Motorola Droid which is only $149.99 on Amazon compared to $200 in the Verizon Store and I saw it had an app for Facebook. Well, that’s fantastic and it was even already logged in…

I potentially could get all the information about this person if I had wanted, because she left herself logged in. Rather than doing leaving it up to the next person to “maybe” log her out, I instead put a status message up for her stating:

“Don’t leave yourself logged in at the Verizon Store. I am logging you out.”

That seemed like the more appropriate thing to do rather than to

• just log her out and have her possibly do the same thing again or
• have a creepy person use the demonstration phone after me and do something they shouldn’t

This may seem like a major “duh” but obviously people do it, a lot.  This girl was born in 1992, went to Easley High School in South Carolina. I didn’t look for anything else, but would you want some random person knowing this?

Tip of the day, please log out when you use Social Networks in public places, you are simply leaving the door wide open for an invasion of privacy.

Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president of communications and public policy wrote a post about Facebook’s newly proposed privacy policies. Speaking of which… are you up to date on privacy policies?

The proposed revisions were drafted by privacy experts and covered the following topics:

• Viewing and editing your profile
• Deactivating or deleting your account
• Limitations on removal
• Backup copies

He also goes into the revisions that were made for the following sections:

• Clarification of Current Practices
• Advertising on Facebook
• Improving the Quality of Facebook’s Ads

It is very important, that we, as Social Networking users, keep tabs on what the privacy policies are. Sure, it’s easy to always just hit “accept” whenever they ask you if you agree with a document, but shouldn’t we be a little less naive?