How to Do a Cyber Spring Cleaning
Erin Burt
This article about digital kidnapping was a real eye-opener for our family's need to set reminders to regularly reevaluate the security of our social media. This article suggested using the time change to remind us to check our social media accounts.
Cyber Spring Cleaning
Clean up your friends list, make sure the accounts on your page are the active accounts of the people you interact with. I’ve got a few family members who somehow get locked out of their Facebook with some regularity and just make a new one. I go through and delete those old accounts so that if they were to become activated by someone else they won’t have access to my account.
Check the privacy settings
Set your Instagram to private and your Facebook posts to default to friends only. Have a conversation with your parent, siblings, and friends if necessary, about tagging themselves in photos of your kids.
Consider the gift of anonymity
I’m a Xennial and had my coming of age in that tiny little sliver of time where I am fully immersed into technology, yet I grew up digitally anonymous. I try to think pretty hard about what my girl will think of someday when she sees my posts about her on my social media. So I’ve decided to post pretty generally about her, and not very often. I’m picky about which photos I post, and I don’t tell any stories about her online that I would be embarrassed about if I were her.
Make a small, private group
Someday my girl will have a thorough job interview, or some technological genius friends. So I try to be intentional with the entirety of my social media. Instead of sharing everything online, I’ve setup a private folder in Dropbox to share with our friends and family. This way those I’m closest to still get all the photos and videos they can stand, and I don’t stress about too much information finding its way into the wrong hands. I think it makes it a little easier to guard against the cyber threats of today, and the future frustrations.
Jenny Ditch is thankful that she has lots of technological geniuses to help make parenting in the digital age as smooth as possible.
