Personal Safety & Social Media

I was conducting a training session for a corporate client last week, where the subject of social media was raised, along with ways in which your online presence could be leveraged against you to compromise your personal safety. Many people when they think of protecting themselves online look at ways to protect themselves from somebody hacking their account etc. and don’t look at ways in which a predator could use the information you have out there to commit other crimes against you and your family. It’s worth noting that most social media apps (including Facebook) have privacy settings that restrict what people can see about you, however you should be aware that the privacy settings of friends and people you are connected to may compromise these.

Though this blog article is not really concerned with protecting yourself from hackers, it is probably worth you taking a quick look as to whether the answers to your security questions for online banking, your mobile phone account etc. are actually out there online e.g. common security questions for these services may ask for, the name of your first pet, the high school you went to, your mother’s maiden name, the city where you were born etc. If you have completed a Facebook profile fully, you will have provided the answers for these questions and this information will be out there in the public domain.

Many predatory individuals use familiarity as a means to disarm us; something that works especially well against children, who may not categorize or see someone as a stranger, if it seems that they know their name and some things about them. This is one good reason, not to put your child’s name on their school backpack, as it gives any predatory individual, an “in” with your child, as they can feign that they know who they are, and construct a story about how you have asked them to pick them up from school, soccer practice etc. If you have a lot of photos of your child, along with information about the activities they engage in, you are giving out information that a sexual predator could use to disarm and lure your child. Whilst child abductions by strangers are not common, they do happen, and it is often the simple fact that the predator knows the child’s name, which disarms them. Whilst social media is a great tool for sharing events and photos with relatives and family members, it is worth looking at what information you might not want to include in a post etc.

Whilst you may want to have a certain degree of visibility on social media, you may not want to put yourself in a position where you are easily searchable by everyone. One simple way, is to not have your Facebook or Twitter accounts, use your actual last name. One of the incidents that was brought up during the training session, involved a woman who received a friend request on Facebook from a client, whilst she was talking to them on the phone – in the context of their work relationship this was inappropriate behavior on the part of the client. The fact that the client could find her so quickly, was because she had used her real, full name, as her profile name, and a quick search of this by the client brought up her Facebook page; if she’d changed her last name to something different (such as her middle name, or something more common like, Smith or Brown) he wouldn’t have been able to find her so quickly/easily. She now found herself in the awkward position of having to either accept his request, thus giving him access to more information about herself, or refusing the request and possibly appearing rude and stand-offish etc.

Another thing that is worth knowing about photos that you publish online, is that they might contain geocode data. If you take a photo on a smart phone, without disabling the geocode option, the location where the photo was taken will be stored as part of the digital data. This then allows predators and criminals to possibly work out, where you live, where you work, where you spend leisure time etc. If you are somebody who takes and posts a lot of photos, you may be mapping out your lifestyle in a way that could be used against you, and your family members e.g. if you take your child to a particular park to play every Saturday at 3 pm and take photos of these events, and post them online with the geocode and timestamp in the data, you are detailing exactly where you and your child will be at a particular time. From a personal safety perspective, predictability is a vulnerability.

One of the things on Facebook that never fails to amaze me is when people check-in at airports, informing the world that they will be away for a period of time. If this information is coupled with a geocoded photo taken in your living room, displaying a 58 Inch plasma TV screen in the background, somebody may well decide to pay your home a visit whilst you are away. Sometimes it is a good idea to not let people know your real time movements e.g. post photographs of your holiday/vacation when you get back, not whilst you’re away etc.

All of this may seem a bit over the top to some people, or even paranoid, however we have to realize that when we publish information about our personal lives online, there are people who may try and use that to gain an advantage over us; that may be a social advantage rather than a criminal one, however any advantage a person has over us puts us at a disadvantage when interacting/dealing with them. Information about you, your family and your lifestyle is valuable to criminals and predators and we should look on it as an “asset” that needs to be protected.