Ten Ways to Protect Your Online Profile

Ten Ways to Secure Your Online ProfilePhotoXpress Are you aware that your personal data is available on the internet for free? Strangers only need a search engine such as Google, Yahoo and Bing to explore our online identity easily. We may not realize so many of our personal data is spread across many websites. Currently, almost every active internet users have an account with social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Yahoo Messenger or Skype, or even all of them. At least our personal data in term of personal identity such as name, date of birth, school, hobbies and email addresses stored in data banks owned by such websites. Data that once you send may one day be your own trouble. Someone may have sent a negative opinion of the person or company via status update on Facebook or tweet updates on twitter. The HRD manager can figure out the personality of their prospective employees via Facebook or Twitter. Bad guys can track your presence just by looking at Facebook status and Tweets on Twitter or view the history of your check-in at Foursquare. Politicians can capture their followers data for devise a method for their campaigns. Your rival can process the content that you post on blogspot or a forum to slander you.

To prevent the exploitation of our data on the internet, keep these in your mind:

1. Always remember that the data you store on the internet is almost permanent. There is no guarantee of anyone or any website on the internet that your data is not copied, it will not read or can be removed with very high security. You may store personal data on Facebook, but your friend may accidentally give your data to another friend, another person or a game called Farmville on Facebook. Although you delete your account, but some data has been copied by others will not be automatically deleted as well.
2. Make your profile private. Do not let people easily find out your personal data. Do not settle for default settings. Make sure you have set up your profile properly. You do not want other people to enjoy the information, photos or your own personal video's.
3. Protect your username and your password. To keep it you need to change your password periodically eg every 3 months. Never give your password to anyone who is not really you know and trust. People who could spread the pain of personal photos on the internet using another person's account. Artist account with 1 million followers could be a field for phishing and scam.
4. Today's cool, not necessarily tomorrow. Think carefully before posting status, tweet or make a blog post. Avoid writing something provocative. Do not write anything that contains sexuality unless you are a doctor. If you need to make comments, give it a fair comment and not to provoke the anger of others.
5. Do not be easily provoked. Internet is full of people who are not responsible. Do not ever respond to anything strange that might make you ashamed, depressed, angry, upset or excited. If you are unsure leave it immediately. Do not hesitate to ask your parents or someone more mature and experienced. Ask a trusted person. The girls should be very careful when chatting on the internet especially with the stranger.