When Does Oversharing Online Become a Security Problem?

Sharing on social media has become a double-edged sword. It’s fun to share things about our lives that help keep us connected to our friends and family, but sometimes sharing too much can actually drive people away and may also compromise our personal safety.

There are so many ways to share things now, Facebook for our thoughts and likes, Instagram for our pictures, Foursquare for our location check-ins. There is a social media network for sharing nearly every aspect of our lives.

The big question: At what point does sharing too much (oversharing) become a problem? Let’s Look at 3 times When Oversharing Can Become a Serious Problem For Ourselves And Others:

When It Provides Your Current Location

Oversharing can become a real personal safety issue when it comes to sharing your current location.
You have to decide, whenever you “check-in” while you’re out and about or on vacation, whether the risk of letting potential strangers know where you are is something you are willing to live with.

You need to realize that when you post a geotagged selfie while you're on vacation you are letting everyone know that you are not at home. A criminal trolling social media sites for this type of opportunity might take notice, locate your address, and rob your house while you're away.

Posting your location on social media is akin to a porch light left on during the daytime, or a newspaper left in the driveway, both things that indicate that you might not be home. Social media vacation posts are worse because they confirm that you are gone (and not just too lazy to get the paper).

They may also give the criminals a timeline to work with. If you post while you're on vacation in a relatively far off place then they could surmise that you are perhaps at least 8 to 10 hours away.

There are three main options:

1.  Try not to post until you’re home. In this case, you don’t risk losing your property.
2.  When you’re eager to post at least something, not to include geo location. So nobody will know where exactly you’re.
3.  Use a VPN technology to show that you’re home. Besides, it can help you hide your real location. Trust.Zone is an excellent way to hide your real location with another. It replaceces your real IP address with IP address in another location.

When it Puts Your Family Members or Loved Ones in Harm’s Way

Do you tag others in your pictures or your status updates when they are with you? This may seem harmless, but it can be a form of oversharing which could put them at risk.

If you are on vacation and you tag another family member in a photo who is also on the vacation, then you have just put them at that same location, thus giving up their current whereabouts. This is harmful for the same reason mentioned earlier.

Tagging other people's children is also not a good thing because those people may not want their children's identity provided to potential strangers. Even if you tag them instead, and don't use their child's name, you are establishing who their parents are. Predators could use this information as part of a pretext to gain trust.

Keep your tags to yourself and don't bring other people into your location check-ins without their permission to do so.

When it Puts Your Job In Jeopardy

Whenever you talk about your work, you could potentially be putting your job at risk, especially if you say something bad about your boss or the company you work for. Companies take social media very seriously and won't take kindly to it when you say something negative. As an employee, you are a representative of who you work for, and your words and actions could potentially cause harm to the company.

You might be able to delete your negative post, but possibly not before someone has taken a screenshot of it and forwarded it to your boss or the local news.

You might also talk about something that is company proprietary information or divulge something that might seem innocuous to you, but might give a competitor an advantage. Example: say you discuss a missed deadline for a product launch. A competitor might pick up on this and push to get their product out before yours.

Think about the potential impact that sharing something might have on yourself and others before you share it with the world. Try not to tag your location since there are people who can use your absence against you and leave you without money and property. Besides, don’t tag other people on your pictures without their permission to do so.

Moreover, don’t talk about your work on the internet because you risk not only being fired, but also putting out company’s private data.

Author BIO:
Diane H. Wong is a search engine optimization specialist and business coach. Besides, she is a research paper writer at the service where everyone can ask to “write an essay for me” so she prefers to spend her spare time working out marketing strategies. In this case, she has an opportunity to share her experience with others and keep up with advancing technologies.