Lately I’ve heard people express concern over the safety of the information they provide on the web including social networking sites like Facebook. It’s true that although you may delete these accounts, your information can remain, forever encapsulated on the World Wide Web. Before you establish accounts on the internet, I suggest reading the privacy policy. Although few people do, it’s worth the time to know what a company can do with the information you provide to them. Before clicking “Create Account” recently, I read a company’s privacy policy and learned that even if I deactivated my account – notice they did not use “deleted” – the site could keep and use the information I provided to them. This fact was not clearly and boldly stated. In fact, it was buried in long, run-on sentences of legal jargon. It reminded me of the “terms and conditions” statement insert for my credit card account. Perhaps this is becoming a standard; however, I find this alarming.
I don’t mean to sound paranoid but start by Googling yourself to see what sort of information is out there. You may be very surprised. I know a friend who, as a member of a professional organization, was included in the group’s member directory on their website. As a result, when his name was searched, his address, employer and phone numbers were easily found by anyone performing a simple search of his name. There are ways to have some search results displaying your personal information removed – for this, check out this information from Google. As a general rule, never share more information with any site than what is required, know what information is public, and create strong passwords that are changed regularly. By the way, if you really do want to delete your Facebook account, click here.