Have You Thought About Privacy Lately?

There seems a lot of talk about privacy and data breaches/hacks. These talks usually revolve around so called sensitive data like credit card or social security numbers. But what about all that data that we hand over to social media websites and Apps? What happens to all those posts and pictures? Do they get stored in a personal file somewhere? And what do those social media companies do with it?
Well this is what I would like to talk about for a moment. Let's look at Facebook, the largest social networking company in the world.
You hopefully know how to set your privacy setting on Facebook. These settings for example control who can see your posts and images and what services (like location and face recognition) you use. These are the settings you should check on a regular basis to ensure they are still how you want them to be. You can find explanations about the different settings here.
But what does Facebook do with all the information you provide? First of all let's look at the the word "information". To put it very simple it is fair to say that Facebook stores EVERYTHING you do. For an in depth explanation of collection and use please visit Facebook's Data Policy website here.
But that seems not all that bad by itself, right? It is however what Facebook does with all the information it collects about you that is troubling. Again this can be simplified very easily.
Facebook does with all the information about you what ever it wants!
So what can you do to keep your private things private? Unfortunately not much.
First of all please always check for all websites, apps, and programs that ask you to register and give them some information about you what your data will be used for.
But more importantly please make sure that you don't give out information you don't want to be around for ever. Think about next time your phone app asks you to use your location if it is really necessary and if that should be able to see your location all the time or only when you use it. In general you should provide as little information as possible. Always question if all those "cool" feature are really worth what you need to reveal about yourself in order to participate.
And then there also of course is the issue of hacking. So please keep in mind that that really funny picture you took of yourself can be seen by a friend of yours and that if either your friends account is hacked it might end up in the next "Fail Army" collection without you even knowing. So please always think about if you would like for the world to know before you post, chat, snap, Instagram, twitter, and whatever else there is.
That's all I have to say for now. Be safe.