By Bernardo De la Cruz
We are addicted to social media. Whether keeping up with relatives and friends or just finding people we just met. But no one seems to really care about protecting themselves online. For example did you know that the privacy settings for Facebook are defaulted to show everyone? That means people you don’t even know can see everything you’ve liked and posted.
Do you have a crazy family you don’t want knowing things about your life, but you are still forced to have them as a friend on Facebook? Customize your updates! You can make your posts visible to only a certain amount of people or just hide it from a few. This is particularly useful when –just to put an example- you’re having issues with your mother-in-law and you want to share your frustration about her to your Facebook friends.
Let’s say you met someone at a disco and you like them; they tell you their name and give their phone number. But wait, you don’t really know if you should call. So how do you find out if they’re crazy? Why you can Google search them of course! This usually brings up any of their social media accounts. Switch the roles and you’re the person regretting giving your information to someone. What do you do? Facebook has a feature to remove your Facebook page from Google (as well as other search engines) search results. You can even take it further and make sure that no one is able to find you on Facebook’s people search.
Many people don’t take social media security seriously enough and that is what causes unnecessary drama. Think back at any fights and problems you had through social media. Those could have been prevented if you simply didn’t post your life online! But that’s not possible for everyone. People wish to share; and to those people, please control everything you do online.
Bernardo De la Cruz, es graduado en Computación y Tecnología en Pace University en NYC y es asesor de Westchester Hispano.
Sala de Redacción/Westchester Hispano
Publicado el 10 de Noviembre, 2015