Up until a few months ago, I had a website up that contained pictures of my family that also listed some updates as well. It was a great way to share with family and friends. The site is no longer available, and it won't be until I can set things up properly.
I have a little bit of advice to share about putting your personal or your family's information online.
Who can see it
The first thing that you need to consider is the availability of the information that you are putting online. Once the information is out there, you no longer control it. Public sites will get seen by the major search engines - regardless of whatever webmaster tricks you have up your sleeve.When search engines see your site, visitors that you don't know will stop by. It is inevitable. Don't put anything up on a public site that you wouldn't be happy with perfect strangers seeing.
The easiest way to protect against public visitors is to either make your entire website password protected, or to make any sections of your website containing private information password protected.
Social Networking
In the webmaster world, social networking is the latest and greatest buzzword. Sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Flickr make it easy to share pictures and updates.While these tools are great, fun, and easy to use, they do have privacy implications. Understand the terms and conditions and get to know how to use these tools in general before putting up any public information.
For instance, most Flickr photos are not only displayed publicly, but they are also tagged with a Creative Commons license - meaning that anybody can use your photos as subject matter for their own projects. You can make your photos visible to only your friends and family members with just a few clicks, but many people aren't aware of the default settings.
Personal Anonymity
You are on the web right now. Unless you are very good at hiding your identity (trust me, you are not) you are not anonymous. Just by viewing this web page, I can more than likely figure out where you are physically located within a few miles.There are a lot of security problems with web browsers that can be taken advantage of to gain a great deal of more information about you - anything from what web sites you've visited to the contents of documents that you have on your computer.
Aside from security hacks, there are a great many other ways to gain information about people who are visiting websites, posting on messageboards, or otherwise surfing the web. The concept is known as data mining. Big advertising companies keep track of what sites you are visiting based on the ads that are displayed. Many of the larger sites actually share information in some fashion with advertisers and that information can include your name, address, phone number, email addresses, etc.
One of the larger snafus in recent history had to do with AOL inadvertently releasing months of search history data. It was literally a matter of hours before people had started to release snippets of the more interesting search histories - some were amusing, some were simply interesting, and some were criminal.
There is not a lot you can do to realistically be anonymous. It is important to at least be aware of that fact.
Protection from Predators
Predators exist online in all shapes and forms. It could be people looking for a home to break into or it could be much much worse than that. Here are a few things you can do to keep yourself safe:- Use different usernames - though you may want people to know who you are across a few sites, you should be in the habbit of changing your usernames at least occasionally. This small layer of obscurity can protect you from people using google to try to get the big picture of you are.
- Use different passwords - Most people use the same password from site to site and even for their email. That means that if one of their online accounts is compromised, all of their accounts are compromised.
- Browse carefully - For moms it isn't a huge problem because the subject matter you are interested in is generally safe. Be wary of sites hosted out of the country (having a domain that doesn't end with .com, .net, or .org), especially eastern europe and asian countries. Be wary of sites that ask for too much personal information.
- Scrutinize online friends - don't be too trusting of people that you only know online and have never met in person.
- Keep your private information private - when you create new accounts, make sure that things like your address and phone number are not displayed in your public profile.
- Google yourself - discover what information about you that you can find online. Getting your information out of all of the search engines isn't easy, but at least you should know what is out there.
- Trust your instincts - if something in the back of your mind tells you to stay away from a person, website, retailer, or whatever, do it. You get those feelings for a reason.
There is a lot more to know and understand about online privacy and personal protection, but I hope that this served as a decent introduction.
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