A note of safety for everyone but especially you ladies. Be careful of the personal information you share online. For your safety’s sake you don’t need to share all of your basic information in your social media profiles. Stalkers will use anything to get to you and physically harm you so please, do not, do not, do not put your personal address or home phone number on your social networking profiles.
Of course if you’re a business owner or professional and that number is on your business cards that’s different. In that case you naturally want people you don’t already know to contact you for potential business. Social networking helps facilitate that perfectly normal business process. But if you don’t have to put your home number online I wouldn’t.
The point is that your home can be easily found and your home phone number likely can be traced to it with all the databases that exist these days so just be smart and safe. Artificial intelligence programming is improving at an exponential pace and information search is one of its primary applications so don’t take any unnecessary risks.
At a minimum put an e-mail address in your profile. And if you want to contact an online friend send a direct message to see if they don’t mind connecting. They’ll do the same with you to via e-mail to see if you’re open to connecting in the real world.
Take advantage of all the opportunity the virtual world has to offer, just be safe while doing so.
Good post! You would think that some things are simple common sense but these days desperate fools are doing asinine desperate things!
This post is good for youth as well.
Points well taken, Marty.
Birth dates (including year of birth), addresses, and more private data are easy to find, especially since it’s made available by social media participants.
I cringe each time I see this information, hoping that the person will by bypassed by predators.
Regina:
True, definitely good tips for the youngsters as well so be sure to pass it on to that crowd too.
As for our demographic, there are still enough newbies coming into the online and social networking worlds for the first time who get caught up in the fun of it all when they see what they’ve been missing and just don’t slow down long enough to think about the personal things we can keep to ourselves, so we just have to help out by reminding them.
Shirley:
Me too. I wrote this post specifically because I and a bunch of old school mates have been catching up with each other lately and an old friend had too much info on her profile. I sent her a quick message to please remove the non-critical info then I got on the keyboard to post these tips for everyone’s benefit.
Feel free to pass it on to your readers and friends too.