Category Archives: Privacy

3 privacy mistakes to avoid in social media

Nowadays everyone has to have a strategy for managing the complexity of social media privacy. Approaches vary:

  • A relatively small number of people just don’t care who knows what about them. By default they let it all hang out. We see evidence of this every so often when someone gets fired by an employer who thought a photo was too racy, or a comment too racist.
  • On the other extreme, certain people have abandoned social networks altogether, or avoided them in the first place. People who have had stalker problems fit comfortably in this category, for example.
  • The majority are somewhere in between. We seek to filter our private information in a practical, socially acceptable way, while minimizing the amount of time and effort we spend understanding policies and tweaking settings.

Everyone in this third group should be aware of three basic privacy mistakes to avoid.

1. Don’t post truly private information on social networks

The most important thing you can do to protect your privacy is to use self-restraint. You simply shouldn’t put information that you consider “private” on social networks. For starters it’s easy to make a mistake with not-always-intuitive privacy settings, thus giving “public” access when you thought it was “friends only”. Facebook in particular seems to change its privacy system frequently in ways that make it easy to make such mistakes (so much so that it almost seems intentional on Facebook’s part).

Also, people you share “private” information with in social media may goof up and share whatever you share with them. This can happen accidentally (see privacy settings, above) or because they don’t realize that some information they receive from you via social networks is private…unlike all of the Continue reading →

3 reasons to try social media add-ons for Outlook or Gmail

Contracts expert Kenneth Adams via Rapportive

Contracts expert Kenneth Adams via Rapportive

Social email plugins like Xobni, Rapportive (now owned by LinkedIn), Gist (now owned by RIM), and Outlook Social Connector (supported by Microsoft) can add an interesting and sometimes productive upgrade to your email experience.

Here’s the basic idea. When you’re reading or writing an email, if you have a social media connection to the senders or recipients, or if they have public social media profiles, you see their recent social media activity displayed to the right side of the email you’re looking at.

So instead of having to visit a bunch of different social media sites and look up a contact on each of them, just open an email and their social media information is all right there in one place.

A number of business purposes are served by using a social email plugin.

1. Staying in touch

Social media updates can help you understand what a contact has been up to, or is doing right now, just as you are sending/receiving email from them. This is useful in much the same way as using a shared calendar at work, which allows you to know when someone is going to be busy or on vacation while you’re trying to schedule a meeting with them. But the social media updates offered by these plugins provide more Continue reading →

Social Media 2010: tension will increase between secrecy and openness

Bruce WilsonI recently participated in an online discussion about corporate social media policies hosted within a social media group on LinkedIn. The person who started the discussion posted Intel’s social media policy as an example. But things got really interesting when another participant asked her attorney, Tedrick Housh at Kansas City’s Lathrop and Gage law firm, to compare Intel’s and IBM’s policies. She posted the following response from Tedrick, who has graciously given me permission to re-post it here with the caveat that it represents his own professional opinion, nothing more:

[Intel's] policy is undoubtedly comprehensive and makes a lot of good points. Without delving into all the links in the policy and exploring them in detail, and notwithstanding the disclaimer that any comments are the responsibility of the employee alone, however, my gut reaction is that this is a little too wordy. It also may create an approval mechanism that borders on “deputizing” all the individual tweets and blogs (“if unsure, check with a manager,” etc.) By exercising control, Intel may find itself liable for not policing communications as closely as the policies promise. The sparser, more colloquial IBM policy leaves more of an impression that as an employee, you swim at your own risk, and will be held accountable for your actions. As an employer, I would want to keep these communications more at arm’s length than the Intel policy intimates.

Thanks Tedrick!

I think this is a highly important issue that will become a major political football within many corporations this year. And although I think Tedrick’s approach – to push responsibility for exercising good judgment down to the individual level – is the optimal one, it runs counter to many corporate cultures and the over-protective tendencies of a majority of attorneys, I would imagine.

Link: Social Media Governance, a repository of corporate social media policies. (Thanks to Chris Boudreaux for maintaining it.)