Privacy Check
Digital Tattoos
Growing up I remember being told to "be careful what you put on the Internet, it's there forever" and I never thought much about what the saying actually meant. Now, as I think back on my Internet use and how I used social media, I wonder if I would have changed anything with what I know now.
I love the term "digital tattoo" because it has more of a permanent feeling than "digital footprint." In a recent post, I did a data mine on myself to see how much of a digital tattoo I have on the Internet. From this data mine, I was surprised by how much information I was able to find about myself in a matter of seconds. However, I am not super active on my social media accounts- I use them more as a viewer rather than an active participant. Because of this, I wanted to take time to check my privacy settings to see how much access others have to my accounts.
Privacy Check
This week allowed me to take a deeper dive into the privacy setting on my social media accounts. Since I am not constantly posting I have not checked my privacy settings since first creating my accounts. I frequently use Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok but I use these to stay in touch with friends and family/view others' pictures and posts. I will use Instagram to post stories, but those only last 24 hours. My most recent post was from my birthday in 2020, but I am on Instagram multiple times every day. With this in mind, I wanted to see how much people have access to (likes, friends, followers, etc.) even though I am not actively posting on my accounts. Two of my most used accounts are Instagram and Facebook so I wanted to do a privacy check on these accounts.
Instagram: I have my account set to private, I people need to request to see my posts and I need to approve them. As I was looking through my privacy settings, I noticed that there were multiple areas that I can adjust based on my preferences (comments, posts, mentions). Under mentions, I noticed that anyone can tag me in a post, but I do have the option to approve tags from specific people.
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Facebook: Most of my settings here are set to 'Friends' or 'Friends of Friends.' A while ago, I had gone through these settings to make my account private and change who has access to my account from 'Everyone' to 'Friends.' Like Instagram, I noticed that I am able to customize my experience for different areas in the app (News Feed, posts, stories, etc.). Since I had not explored my own privacy settings in a while, I wanted to make sure I took time to understand what each section meant.
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Reflection
After reading an article from the Washington Post, I learned tips that I can do to be in the "5 percent who are actually in control" of my personal data. This article looked at the top five consumer tech companies: Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. After reviewing my own privacy settings, I was not too surprised to see that my accounts were all set to private. However, there were definitely some settings that I changed to make them more secure.
Thanks for sharing the results of your privacy audit and for linking to your original data mine on yourself. These are things we should strive to do yearly but often fall by the wayside.
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