Safeguarding your Digital Footprint

 After watching Orange’s Digital Dirt video, I really reflected on the possible damage that your social media content could cause you. I would have always assumed that referring to your work on social media is something that no one is silly enough to do, but I must admit I gave little to no thought about how your own personal posts could reflect on you in a professional situation.

My personal opinion is that social media is for sharing personal experiences and opinions with people you know and trust, connecting with friends old and new, and sharing joyous moments and occasions with those who are too far away to join you. I do not believe in using social media to slander, degrade or humiliate people, to complain about your work or your colleagues or management, or for any other inappropriate behaviour.

Working in a Social Services role adds some new restrictions to appropriate social media content. You would be surprised at how easily a service user, or one of their relatives or friends could access your social media account and the content within. Would you voluntarily share personal information about yourself and your family with your service users? No? Then why would you enable them to have access to it online?

Can you really expect to be taken seriously as a professional if you are sharing inappropriate content on social media platforms? Not really. So why do it?

The implications of poor use of social media for social service workers could be devastating and damaging to your career.

I took the time to google myself after watching the video and I will admit I had a moment of panic as I awaited the results, worried that somewhere in my younger days I may have posted something that could be seen as damaging, but I was relieved to find that according to Google, I am rather anonymous. There are many people with whom I share a name, and they are much more internet worthy than I. If you use the shortened version of my name then you might find my Facebook profile, and if you can connect the filtered-to-perfection profile picture with my actual face, then congratulations, you can read all about my days out with the kids, or admire my endless check-ins at Tae Kwon Do or Football Training or any other kid’s classes that I have been dutifully attending for the last 18 years. However, luckily my mind is savvy enough to keep my private opinions or information exactly that, private. Even after adding my job title and location to the search…nada.

I really valued the advice given on ‘8 Tips to Effectively Manage Your Digital Footprint’ (Just in case you haven’t read it - https://justcreative.com/8-tips-to-effectively-manage-your-digital-footprint/ ) I was rather pleased to find that I am already taking most of these steps to ensure my online safety, however, there were one or two that I took notice of and have decided to carry out. One of the more surprising tips I found to be quite an important one, Check Your Cookies. Monitoring which sites your browsers have accepted cookies from allows you to weed out and block any strange or unrecognisable ones. This is something that I have not been doing thus far but I will be doing from now on, I think its important to know which sites are tracking you and eliminate the ones that are not welcome to do so. I also think that splitting your digital footprint is a very important step to take to ensure your online safety. This is when you take steps such as dedicating only one credit card to be used for online shopping so that should your information be compromised, you don’t have to cancel all of your cards. Or using various email accounts for different aspects of the internet such as social media, work, shopping etc so that again, should one become compromised, it is not detrimental to all of your online presence. It is so important for you to stay safe online, especially when you work in a role that could potentially spike peoples interests in your private life or information.

The most important tip, and one that I already preach to my kids and their kids and anyone else who will listen, is that once its out there its out there. So please do ensure that you privatise any posts that you would not be comfortable having your boss, teacher, mother-in-law, potential spouse, or children read in the future. Once you post it you cannot take it back.

I think the information on safeguarding your digital footprint should be made more obviously available - or just forced upon - all employees, students, service users and general members of the public. I found some of this information surprising and learned of some tips that I was previously ignorant to. This is a topic that needs more awareness, more recognition and can therefore have more effect.  

 

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