Social Media Safety Tips

Social media applications like Skype, FaceTime, Foursquare, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Instagram have become valuable tools for businesses and nonprofit organizations to promote goods and services, for individuals to stay up-to-date on news and information, and for friends and family stay connected across great distances. As we increase our digital connectivity, we also increase our vulnerability to malicious intrusion by cyber criminals and embarrassment about our own poor judgment on the World Wide Web.

Rookies and seasoned social media veterans alike can benefit from evaluating and revising their social media involvement from time to time. These are a few social media pointers:

* Slow and steady is always a good social media engagement plan so that you can learn some of the do's and don'ts.

* Set up a separate email address for each social media account to keep it separate from your normal email in case something goes wrong with your social media account.

* Study each social media application's ever-changing privacy and notification tools thoroughly and periodically.

* Hide all identifying information that the application will allow you to hide, such as your phone number, date of birth, street address, and email address so that you can control who has access to that information.

* Set your privacy preferences conservatively to require your approval before anyone can post something on your wall or tag you in a photograph.

* Add friends (or whatever else the application calls your connections) slowly.

* Never post a photograph that includes identifiable images of children without the consent of the parents.

* Set the obscenity and pornography filters very conservatively to screen out most objectionable content.

* Be careful about adding anyone as a connection if you and the person share only one mutual connection because such people tend to promote malware and pornography.

* When someone suggests a game or application, either hide the suggestion or check out the game or application independently on a reliable web application review site to make sure that it does not include malware.

* Some applications allow people can add you to groups without your consent, so monitor your groups from time to time to make sure that you have not been added to a group that makes you uncomfortable or that you find objectionable.

We invite people to share additional social media safety tips on our blog at www.hawkinslaw.com. In this rapidly evolving digital age, ignorance is not an excuse for mistakes -- it is an invitation to disaster.

Jeff R. Hawkins and Jennifer J. Hawkins are Trust & Estate Specialty Board Certified Indiana Trust & Estate Lawyers and Jeff is a Fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel. Both lawyers are admitted to practice law in Indiana, and Jeff Hawkins is admitted to practice law in Illinois. Jeff is also a registered civil mediator and the 2014-15 President of the Indiana State Bar Association.

Find more about these and other topics at www.HawkinsLaw.com, like us on Facebook, follow Jeff Hawkins on Twitter @HawkinsLawPC or call us at 812-268-8777. © Copyright 2015 Hawkins Law PC. All rights reserved.