Taking care of personal information

The reason why social networking sites are so popular is because they make it easy to share information with so many people: it’s easy, for example, to let your friends see your holiday photos before you even get back home, or, when you do get home, you can instantly look up the profiles of the people you met on holiday and send them a message. But it’s important to remember that any information you post on a site could be public and may be seen by lots of people.
This means you have to be careful about what you reveal about yourself to other users. If information you post is seen by more people than you expect, this could pose a risk to your privacy or even your personal safety. Once information is ‘out there’ you might not be able to control what happens to it: your profile may be seen by thousands of strangers, parts of a website may be ‘public spaces’ so what you say on them is also public, and not everyone will agree with what you write. Also, it can be easy for others to copy your pictures, even alter them, and send them to people you don’t know.
So, before you create a profile, post a picture or tell the online world what you got up to today, have a think about the following and consider whether you are being as safe in the online world as you would be in the offline world.