No one would walk into a crowded room and begin broadcasting to total strangers all the details of their personal life—from health issues to their friends’ and family’s names, ages, jobs, schools, etc. But too often, people don’t think twice about posting such private information on social media. The ramifications of oversharing have an impact on your personal and professional life, and those of your friends and family. 

Social media can be a great place to connect, share, and learn, but once information is posted online, you’ve lost control of it. Ensuring your privacy settings are strong isn’t enough to protect yourself, you also need to understand what data is being collected and how it’s being used. 

Privacy Settings: Regularly review the privacy settings on your social media accounts, especially when the site’s terms of service or privacy policy changes. Remember that these controls can prevent other site users from accessing your posts and information, but your information is still being collected, mined, stored, and sold by the social media platforms themselves. 

Privacy Tree: Privacy settings won’t prevent someone that you’re connected with from viewing and downloading your posts and/or sharing them with others. 

Artificial Intelligence: AI, social media, and marketing are a perfect combination. Marketers now use information gathered from your online habits to feed you ads focused on your last search or purchase and continue to learn even more about you. 

Digital Death: When a person dies, their online presence becomes even more vulnerable to abuse if their accounts aren’t actively maintained or deleted by their survivors. Most of the major platforms have established procedures to help decommission accounts of the deceased, but they aren’t always used. 

Unintentional Disclosure: The information you post about yourself has the potential to reveal much of your personal history, including the answers to your online secret security questions. 

The more information you share, and the more others share about you, the more information can be collected and used by corporations, governments, and others. One of the best ways to protect yourself online is to limit what you share and what you allow others to share about you. 

The information you share online is commonly used in highly targeted phishing attacks. ITS continues to simulate these attacks and will assign training to individuals who are routinely susceptible to these simulations. If you’re concerned that you’ve been the target of phishing, see Reporting a Phishing Message (How-to). 

—Peter Lundstedt, ITS