Friday, August 23rd

"What is the importance of online safety and protecting your information? What do you do to protect yourself online? Share an experience you or someone you know has had with online safety." Online safety is important because you need to keep your personal information away from strangers that you are unaware of. If a stranger tries to get a hold of information about you, you have no way of knowing how that person will use that information. That person could use it to find out where you live, call your phone number(s), find out your other family members and other personal things that only friends and people you trust can have the knowledge of. There could be people that you don't know checking your facebook or your twitter to see where you live, go to school, etc,. One thing that is important for facebook users to do is to set their profile as private- which means somebody who clicks on your profile cannot see any personal information without you accepting their friend request. The same option is available for twitter, instagram, etc,. I personally have my instagram set to if someone wants to follow me they have to send me a request so that I can approve of who sees my information and my pictures. If I didn't have my Instagram set to the 'private' setting I would have way too many people who are viewing my pictures that I do not know at all. Another reason it is a good choice to set your settings like that is that without it people who follow you could follow you without you even knowing. There pictures wouldn't show up on your notifications and they would obtain to the ability to follow you without you having any idea. One time one of my friends didn't have her facebook profile set to 'private' and someone was able to hack her facebook account and figure out her phone number. Another thing that happened is her friends list became something that nearly everyone in the city (or it seemed like that), was friends with her. She hardly knew anyone of her friends in the list but since her profile wasn't set to 'private' she wasn't able to sort out her friends from people who just wanted to view her profile. Bottom line is: protect your privacy from those who you don't know because you never have any idea of who is really looking you up or checking up on you.