Digital Safety and Citizenship
What You Do Online Matters
What are the benefits of Social Media?
- Communication: It's a way to stay in touch and stay connected to friends and family.
- Expression: You can post your personal opinions and ideas about important topics.
- Entertainment: It’s fun to share things you're interested in.
- Future: It's an opportunity to present a curated version of yourself for the public or for colleges and employers.
What are the drawbacks of Social Media?
- Oversharing: when people share something they later regret
- Permanence: Embarrassing or regrettable posts, including those that "disappear" (Snaps, Stories, etc.), become part of your permanent digital footprint, which might have a negative impact. Define digital footprint as all the information online about a person posted either by that person or others, intentionally or unintentionally.
- Social pressure: When everyone else is posting, you feel pressure to participate.
- Life balance: Managing multiple platforms and accounts requires a lot of time.
What is your Digital Footprint?
Do you know which bits of your personal information are publicly available (to people that you have not specifically “friended”)? Have you ever checked out your page to see what it looks like to a stranger? Do you periodically check your privacy settings?
There are two issues here. The first is that you need to be aware of your privacy settings and manage them carefully. The second is that you need to periodically check your settings because social media applications have been known to change privacy settings when their privacy policy updates, or there is a software update, or there is a bug. Remember, if the application is free, then your personal data is what is valuable to the social media company Share the minimum.
Here are a few points to consider:
- Is your account publicly available? Can anyone see your personal information? Is it just friends? Or friends of friends? Or the public?
- Are your photos on Instagram available to everyone? Or to just approved followers?
- Is your year of birth available to anyone? Is your address, school name, city or cell phone number publicly available? (They shouldn’t be!)
- Any of these personal variables could be combined to create your online profile, which could then lead to identity theft and/or being approached by a predator.
Do you take quizzes and surveys while online?
These fun quizzes may be collecting data about you, your friends and your friends of friends. This data can be aggregated to create a profile about you. If the survey asks questions that are too personal (such as your sexual preference, or what medical conditions you have), do not complete the survey. This data may be used in the future, not just for ads but also for other profiling purposes. (Answers to security questions can now be based on profiles that you have no control over!)
Always look for the option to determine what personal data can be collected and shared with others. Give out as little information as possible.