Five tips for staying safe on social networks

Guest Post from Deborah Preston, Norton Online Safety Advisor

As social networking sites continue to receive criticism about their privacy settings, it struck me that it’s not just the social networks that should be responsible for our online safety and privacy, we should all be! As users of the site, we should all be aware of the security products and settings that we can use to protect what we post online and our to protect our identities.

Away from the virtual world, we wouldn’t expect someone else to look after our purse, wallet, handbag or house keys. Why should we then expect others to do this for us online? Why is it that when it comes to the virtual world, we rely on, and believe that, others will protect our online persona better than we would?

Throughout 2011, the popularity of social networking sites has increased. This is a trend that will continue in 2012. We therefore have a responsibility to ourselves and our families, of protecting our online lives and assets, like we do in our real world. Similarly, we need to ensure our children know how to protect themselves, just how we would in real life.

My top five tips for keeping yourself and your children safe online and on social networking sites are:

1. Openly talk to your kids about social networking sites. Ensure that your whole family is familiar with and understand the security settings that are available to them. Also remember to talk to them about any changes/updates that are made to a social network’s privacy settings.

2. Limit the amount of personal information that you post on social networking sites. Don’t feel obliged to share your birth year as well as your birthday. A birthday should suffice as this hides your actual age and makes it more difficult for ID fraud. Yet you still receive ‘Happy Birthday’ messages! If you are using a location based social network, check your setting and make sure that it is only your family and friends that can see your activity.

3. Be wary of third party applications and avoid applications that seem suspicious. Always modify your settings to limit the amount of information the applications can access and don’t forget to revisit security settings each time you add an application.

4. Use strong passwords. When setting passwords use of mix of numbers, letter and symbols. Also, be creative and change your passwords regularly.

5. Keep software, particularly your web browser, up-to-date and always use a reliable internet security product.

December 12, 2011 | Filed Under Family Online Safety 

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