Five pieces of advice for your social network

This bit of advice may be a bit too late for many of you, but there are still a lot of people that can benefit from this sage advice.  I can also offer a way to hopefully minimize the damage you may have inadvertently caused.

I will discuss Facebook for this example, but all of this advice can be applied to any social networking site.

If I were to come up to you and ask you to tell me the intimate details of your love life, would you bare all or would you punch me in the nose?  Well, I value my nose, so I am only talking hypothetically.

I would bet that you would definitely decline to share that information with me.  On the other hand, you may have already done that with total strangers.

I have quite a few “friends” on facebook that were total strangers when I requested them to add me as a friend or vice versa.  They were friends of friends and I liked what they were saying.

Eventually, they became friends.  A few who had propensities to have some friends that were disrespectful of my other friends have been defriended, but I have made pretty good choices and there have been very few I have permanently kicked out.

By now, I hope you would have removed everything on your account that could embarrass you, like pictures taken at bars and parties.  Remember that very high-profile court case that showed the defendant in a blue dress partying real hard at a bar?  Yes, she got off, but you or I with such a picture would only help to present a perception to the world that we may not like.

When someone posts a picture on his or her site, they share it with their friends; their friends can share too and so on.  Remember that famous 6 degrees of separation between any one and a piece of Bacon?  It is actually a little over 4.

If someone else posts an embarrassing picture of you and tags you in it, you can remove the tag.  However, that does not remove the picture.

If they remove the picture, someone else may also have a copy of it.  You can copy any picture on any social networking site – even if they have controls to prevent it.

Just use “Alt-Print Screen”, open up Paint and paste.  Crop the picture from the rest of the copied window and you now have a good copy of the picture.  Taking a picture of the screen makes for really bad pics.

As I was writing this article the TV was on for background noise.  What popped up was surprising as a couple having some problems experienced a big escalation in anger when it was revealed that nude pictures of one of them with another person appeared on their social media account.

So you can see that the social networking sites can store incredible amounts of information, some of it even harmful to your health.  Would you want your boss getting hold of that party picture and then see you come in late on a Monday morning?  The connection he or she makes might not be helpful for you career advancement.

I recommend several things:

• Remove any pictures of you that might be embarrassing.  If you are recently married or engaged you should have already done this a long time ago.
• Ask your social network friends to remove any pictures of you that might prove embarrassing.
• Be careful of what you say.  People can save comments you have made on other friend’s posts.  They might be embarrassing.  I have a political side and have said a few things about my party’s primary candidates in the past.  Fortunately, I never had been put in the position of being asked to join a campaign for a person I had dissed.  Hmmm… maybe they found those remarks and that’s why they didn’t call.
• Remove personal information that you may not want to share.  Birthdays are fine, just don’t include the year (or change the year to 1894).  It feels good to get hundreds of warm wishes on your birthday, and saves you time from sending them to yourself.  You may even want to publish a different city and/or state.
• Do not spend any money on services that say they will remove all traces of you from the entire internet.  They may catch and remove quite a few references but there are so many sites that they will not be able to change.  There are web crawlers out there that archive web sites on particular days.  Also there is nothing to prevent someone from posting your personal information without your permission.  Yes, you can take them to court, but by then the damage will already be done.

You can do a web search on my name and you will even find my comments about a few odd things that were in Microsoft Word v2.0.  You might stumble upon me baring my soul when discussing Krazy Kreatures.

The best you can do is remove everything you can and hope some past transgressions do not come back to bite you.

For the future, don’t get into situations where you might do something that will be embarrassing.  Remember, just about everybody’s phone has both a still camera and even a video camera built-in.

It is sort of like pretending to throw a baseball at your neighbor’s window and slipping.  Once the ball leaves your hand, you are powerless to pull it back and the neighbor will have the proof of your throw inside his house.

Please be careful out there, your next employer may require you to hand over all your social media account logins and passwords!