Remember that picture of my dog that supposedly only my friends can see?

Now imagine that private (but not really) image had all kinds of information in it, like what could be shown in the picture below. Or imagine if it was taken with a new smartphone camera that stores personal information like my location in the photos…

Windows Vista & Windows 7 have a link on the detail tab of every picture property labeled “Remove Properties and Personal Information”. You can select one, or several images at a time. If you are posting a picture online, that you want to keep some form of privacy with, I would suggest using this built in Windows feature.

And for all you Micro$oft haters out there MAC OSX and Linux both require third party software to remove this personal data.

I read this sentence about unsolicited credit card offers and laughed “Opting In: Most consumers prefer to continue to receive offers that may interest them.” (source: http://www.experian.com/credit-education/opting-out.html)

Do people really sign up for credit cards offers they receive unsolicited? Either way, an effective way to control what direct mail you receive (as best as you can, nothing will ever stop it) for five year periods is to register with DMA Choice.org: https://www.dmachoice.org/dma/member/home.action

They have a pretty good tutorial on the hows and whys of direct mailing as well which I found interesting: https://www.dmachoice.org/dma/static/learn_more.jsp

As the document states “Social networking will always be a tradeoff between safeguarding your privacy and enjoying the benefits of socializing online”… so why not make safeguarding your privacy as secure as the the US Military recommends for it’s service members?

…use my personal information to target advertisements!!!!

While browsing my YouTube privacy settings I noticed an option that states “Please use my account information to provide me with relevant advertising”. It of course is checked by default. I am torn between whether I am more amused with the wording of that default privacy selection or the “More Ads” button on Facebook. At any rate, as always, check your privacy settings on any website you have an account on.

I plan on leaving the YouTube setting checked, seeing as they do provide me a free service, and the more targeted their ads, the more ad revenue they are likely to get, which in turn will keep the content free for my listening and visual pleasure. However, the “Please use…” at the beginning of that check box still makes me laugh.

Figure 1. “More Ads” Facebook button

Figure 2. YouTube Privacy Settings

It seems that every day we are finding more and more that what goes online, stays online, whether you delete it or not. An interested read on CNN today about digital images not going away after being deleted: http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2009/05/21/study-photos-stay-online-after-you-delete-them/

Which intrigued me to look into how content management sites are handling deleted content.

Twitter

http://www.cio.com/article/print/493009

“However, by using Twitter’s Advanced search facility, all posts (whether they have been deleted or not) can be found, meaning that thousands of Twitter users can still get hold of Ross’s personal email address.”

Social networking sites in general

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/05/your_photos_stuck_in_the_cloud.html

Every site served the test image given knowledge of its URL except for Windows Lives Spaces, whose photo servers required session cookies (a refreshing congratulations to Microsoft for beating the competition in security). We ran our initial study for 30 days, and posted the results below. A dismal 5 of the 16 sites failed to revoke photos after 30 days:

Facebook

Here is a picture of my dog from facebook. All of my privacy settings are set to friends only,

I wonder if it is because the privacy setting is only for “Photos tagged of You” not “Photos you upload” (see my settings below).

Even better, is that on albums where the Privacy setting is set to “Only Friends” they provide a link for public access. If you go to the link you can see the images, even if you are not a friend.

The moral of the story is only upload pictures of your pets or other images you don’t mind the world seeing!