How to Promote Safer Online Sharing

In 2017, Mark Zuckerberg officially announced that there are officially 2 billion Facebook users.  Even until now, Facebook remains to be the top at its game.  However, too much exposure to social media can have its disadvantages.

In this blog post, I will share tips on how to ensure that you are not sharing too much information or TMI in chat abbreviation. A safer sharing procedure can help you maintain your privacy, and not put your identity in jeopardy.

Tips for social media sharing

• Check the privacy settings from time to time.

Whether you are using Facebook, Twitter, or any social media platform, the first thing to do is to check the privacy settings. By default, your profile and your succeeding posts may be set to public. As much as possible, do not share every bit of you publicly.
If you try to search yourself online, you would be surprised that there are information about you. People may see and access this. Are you sure you would want the world to know this information? Potential employers may see this personal post.
Lastly, even though you have set your profile to private, social networking websites may have set the privacy settings back to public. When they update their terms and conditions, which happens constantly by the ways, users don’t even realize that the settings have changed too.

• Only connect with people you actually know in real life.

It is a safer practice to only accept request of people you know. I know it’s tempting to say hi and make friends with other people. However, phishing is real. Online scams are real. Worse, identity theft is real.
Without NO real-world connections, how are you sure that this stranger is telling the truth? How can you verify that this person is really who he or she is claiming to be?

• Don’t make your list of friends or connections public.

You may not be the victim here, but your friends might be. Spear-phishing can happen to your friends and cybercriminals gather information about you to convince your friends that it is indeed you.
Your friend may even NOT know that he or she is the potential target. With access to your friends list, a cybercriminal can easily pretend to be you and start sending emails to defraud people you know.

• Don’t post about specific dates and events of your life.

Sadly, in this digital age, people just haphazardly share full names and birth dates of their children. A cybercriminal can now connect this information to the mother’s maiden name. The same is true with other important events like death date, wedding date, and engagement date. Generally, people think sharing these events and dates are fine. However, this can start an identity theft. Your son and daughter won’t even know it until he or she is grown up and trying to get a loan. It is as if you are inviting strangers to commit a crime.
In addition, do not hand personal information to burglars so easily! Do not give out names of people, location, and dates. Instead, send the specific details to people you are actually inviting to the event.

Share but do not overdo it.

Lastly, before making a public announcement or sharing it on social media, make sure you are not sharing too much. Carefully choose the information that you will share online. This is a friendly reminder from Omnipotech. Contact the Omnipotech Support Center to know more about improving your online security.