Online Profiles and CyberSecurity

Your personal and professional digital footprint can make you vulnerable.

So you want to check you understand what the risks are and how you can better protect your privacy while still boosting your visibility.

Everywhere that you create content you are being active and creating a digital footprint. You may think of yourself as “creating content” but every like, comment and other interaction is creating content. Not just creating blogposts, updating your status and uploading photographs. Even sharing news articles is creating content.

It is not always active content, there will also be passive contetn which is out of your control for example where you are tagged in a photograph, or your work profile/website.

What does the content say about you (and your family)?

Our use of social media can create a whole profile of someone. Starting right from before your child is born. Sonogram and baby photographs can give key security information such as full name, dob and location of birth. Photographs of your kids can reveal the school they go to, your network of family and friends. So be sure to check your security / privacy settings – and encourage your network to do so as well. Remember, your data can be revealed by content of people in your network who don’t have secure/private profiles who like comment and tag. If you are a member of a public group – a lot of information can be found out via groups as well.

It is not just facebook.

A public twitter account can also tell people a lot about you (not just the factual stuff about what you tweet). It can also pull together information about how you tweet and when which can be used with location information.

Finally, LinkedIn which you are most likely to use for professional purposes – it can tell people your name, location, age (based on your education information), school, potentially DOB. A simple bit of digging and this can reveal you full address (via companies house or the electoral roll). Your home address can then reveal things like your home /floor plan on websites such a right move.

So what can you do about it?

Well you could be invisible. However, if you are reading this blog it is unlikely that you would want to go this far.

Start by having professional and personal profiles and making a clear decision on what you are using for personal use (and making this secure) and what you use for “professional” use which you will use openly but in a mindful way.

An examples of how you might set this up would be:

• Facebook – personal account
• Facebook – company page
• LinkedIn – professional profile
• Twitter – personal account
• Twitter – professional / company account
• Instagram – personal
• Instagram – professional account

and then set up the security settings/geolocation settings as required to ensure that your personal accounts are separate and secure. Don’t follow your personal accounts and don’t use the same photograph across your personal and professional accounts if you are keeping these separate.

You should also regularly change passwords and close/delete dormant accounts.

Be mindful of what you post publicly.

be safe. be secure.