The Best Advice for a New Social Media User
The best advice for a new social media user is to set their profile to default to privacy. This means that every post and update is set to go to no one but the user. This keeps the information about the person completely private and gives the user the most privacy of any action on the social media system.
Most of the social networks set their defaults to "everyone can see my profile". This means that any person that wants to look at the user's profile will see everything that person has ever posted. Their privacy is not assured on the system and enemies (or people with bad intentions) can study a person's habits and attack them on the internet (and sometimes physically if they have allowed their phone to do location based updates).
This means that a person will not experience privacy until they turn this service off. The negative of turning this service is off is that the user will have fewer chances to interact with their friends and family because they will not share their location or certain updates. However, the privacy that a user gets is well worth the trouble of keeping their updates private.
One mistake that happens over and over on the social media systems is that the users of a system forget to set their update to private. This means that they target everyone instead of a certain person. This reveals information about the person or the person they are talking to on accident. This is a major problem and the best way to make sure that this does not happen is to set the profile to default to complete privacy.
The truth is that it is better to send an update to no one instead of sending a sensitive post to everyone. There is far more damage that can be done when a person reveals too much information. This damage can cause them to be fired, and it can cause them to have problems with their interpersonal relationships in some cases. Therefore, the minor annoyance that this setting would cause is offset by the privacy that the technique affords.
Finally, a person cannot assume that this makes their profile truly private as there are many systems and tools designed to read the private messages of a person. Therefore, a person must make a plan to only release information that they are comfortable with everyone knowing. Every piece of information on a social network can be read and discovered by the right tools and no information is safe on the social networks as long as they do not tout privacy as their main feature.
In closing, a person should always set their profile to default to complete privacy. However, this does not mean that they will be able to keep their profile totally private. In most cases, this will keep everyone out but the people who have the right tools. In any case, a person who sets their profile to default to private is a person who experiences far more privacy than those people who do not.
Scott Buendia consults for Bizbuilt.com. All the views and tactics in this article are tactics and ideas of the author; they do not necessarily represent the ideals, beliefs, or trademarks of Bizbuilt.com. Visit his card on Bizbuilt here, https://www.bizbuilt.com/socialmediaprivacy.
