As IT professionals, it is our job to understand emerging technologies and to help our customers to use them. It is also our responsibility to help our customers understand when “bleeding edge” technology is not always the best choice. Using the example of our little elevator adventure, it is easy to see that using email or social media, while having a certain “cool factor”, would have been a poor choice for timely communication.

Are you helping your customers send the right message?

iPhone Photo Mapping

I read this morning about a pair of UK citizens that were detained by the US Department of Homeland Security.

This once again underscores the need for people to be mindful of what they post online. Whether it is Homeland Security, a current or future employer, or even the burglar/psychopath/molester down the street, too much information online can bring negative consequences.

I have some simple rules that I follow online:

• When signing up for online accounts, enter home address information only if it is really needed. If you just have to post your personal details on Facebook, take time to tighten your security to limit who can see them.
• If you have your own blog, you may have registered your own domain name.  Your registration information, including home address, phone numbers, etc. can be seen by anybody.  Spend the extra money to pay for domain privacy, and then only law enforcement can retrieve your personal info.
• Limit how much information you provide on blogs or in social media. Revealing too much information about your children or vacation plans, when combined with address information (see above)  can be an open invitation to “bad guys”.
• Pretend for a minute that the Internet doesn’t make you anonymous. You’ll think twice about trash talking people on social media or web sites, and you may just avoid pissing off current or future employers.  Google yourself and check out what you find.
• Selling on eBay, Kijiji or Craigslist? Watch how much personal information you reveal. If you are posting pictures of your goods, review them to ensure you haven’t inadvertently included identifying data like house numbers, license plates or dangly bits (NSFW).
• If you geocode your photos, fuzz the coordinates so they don’t identify your immediate neighbourhood. The same holds true for smartphone social media apps that record your location, such as Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook Places.

I don’t want to sound alarmist but like the old saying goes, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. Anything you post online is there for almost all to see and for a long time.

What do you want people to see?