Privacy nut…
To know me is to know that I am a privacy nut. It’s almost a running joke with friends and colleagues, almost! I think I’m a bit of an anomaly among my peers, after all people are sharing it all with Facebook, Twitter, etc. Don’t get me wrong, I’m on all of those websites (except Google Docs or Gmail or as my friends put it, the G word), but I try to be very careful about the things that I share. Here are some good practices when baring it all on the web:
Be aware of your audience and expect that what you’re sharing it is going beyond your circle of friends. If you’re an entrepreneur, think about what your clients would think. If you’re a professional, think about what your boss would think or a potential boss. Same goes for college students. Most HR departments spend hours reviewing your Facebook page and your Tweets to determine whether you would be a good fit for their company. So those pictures from Cabo? I would take those down.
Do not share personal information. Don’t make it easy for stalkers or for anyone to steal your identity.
Some of the practices I use in my own practice? I only send PDFs of contracts to the contracting party. When sending Word documents, I make sure to scrub all the metadata. If you were in a poker game, would you share your hand? Then why share the edits you’ve made on your documents.
I have an assistant to help me with administrative tasks and I think she’s great. Even so, I use a secure wiki to share documents with her. I do not allow access to my laptop. I also make sure I know what programs are being used on my behalf and check their privacy policies. I recently discovered an application was being used that had less than satisfactory terms and conditions. Basically it said, we owe you nothing, you owe us nothing. Where I would rather avoid that application, I understood it was vital to her tasks so I quickly put into place protocols whereby no identifying information was to be placed on that application. After all, I owe a duty to my clients to keep their information confidential.
Information is only as secure as you keep it. Always make sure that you have control of your own information. If you are putting sensitive information online, take the time to read their privacy policies then decide whether you want to use that website. And if the website doesn’t even have a privacy policy? Surf away!
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