• Harvard Business Review: Your Future Employer Is Watching You Online. You Should Be, Too. “Welcome to the permanent job search,” this post begins, going on to explain how employers are using ever more rigorous methods to screen candidates using their web shadows. Gives some useful advice and reminders on managing your reputation online. 
• Facebook could be a standard feature in credit scoring. Neville Hobson discusses a report in Der Spiegel that a German credit agency is planning to use information about people’s online social networks as part of their credit scoring system. A commenter says out that in the UK, pay-day loans company Wonga.com has been doing this for some time. 
• On Facebook, ‘Likes’ Become Ads. Embarrasing tales of Facebook likes becoming ads in this New York Times article. A law professor is reported to say ‘Facebook, he wrote, interprets a “like” as a statement of a user’s attitude and a “green light” to create an ad.’       

The most post popular posts relating to Me and My Web Shadow has long been “Some Beginner’s Guides to Twitter“.

This post from Beth Kanter is nice addition to those introductory guides, sharing some exercises from a Colorado non-profit‘s team Twitter learning sessions. 

If you’re learning to use Twitter have a go at some of these, on your own or with a friend or team (take a look at Beth’s post and the comments for more ideas): 

• Find a new hashtag and use it successfully

• Tweet a photo you took with your phone

• Follow 5 new people that interest you

• Schedule a tweet using HootSuite, Tweetdeck, or another service

• Find and sign up for a link that will track your clicks

• Search for a topic or hashtag you are interested in

• Create a Twitter lists

• Reply to someone’s tweet and get them to respond to you

• Use a social media tool to determine your most effective time of the day to tweet

• Gain 10 new followers by following less than 10 people

• Use #FF to list a few people you enjoy following

Another useful approach if you have a large team or workshop session is to get people to share how they use Twitter, the moments when it has saved them time, brought them news first, thrown up an unexpected opportunity. 

The links below are all very useful, but I would also recommend the Mashable Beginner’s Guide to Twitter.

Originally posted on my personal blog, Open….

At the Brighton Digital Festival talk on online reputation for artists I did the other evening, I was asked to post some beginners’ guides to Twitter (thanks to Helen Wilshaw for the reminder).

Naturally there is a pretty good one in Me and My Web Shadow, but there’s no shortage of free good advice out there online…

Here are a few I like the look of:

• The Telegraph’s Shane Richmond’s step-by-step guide to getting started is great.
• As is is The Atlantic’s The Bare Bones Guide to Twitter
• And the Huffington Post has one too…

And, showing far Twitter use has spread, the DeBrett’s social networking etiquette guide has a nice way of putting things (via Harry Wallop in The Telegraph:

Do not overload the Facebook home page feed with countless status updates. Be sure that your posts are written to enlighten others, and not used as an exercise in vanity.

Well, quite!

Twitter image (cc) Svartling

Search engines that can find pictures of people using an image of their face are not new, but their use has not been widespread so far. There are some search tools of varying reliability that look for your own photos or images like the one you have uploaded in video and Apple’s iPhoto uses the technology to help you sort your pics in iPhoto. So far so innocuous…

But the implications of facial recoginition search are a little disturbing. In theory it means that images of someone can be found that even they don’t know about. Ever wandered into the background of a photo taken at a nightclub or walking down the street?

It doesn’t take too much imagination to work out how this stuff could be embarrassing…

Well, now Facebook has rolled it out as a feature and – as per usual – has done so on an opt-in basis. That means you need to tell them if you don’t want this to happen, as All Facebook puts it: “your friends will be prompted with various images that you haven’t yet been tagged in and ask them to tag you.”

All Facebook suggests you do the following to opt-out of this:

1. Head to your Facebook Privacy Settings (in the drop-down “Account” menu on the upper right hand side of your Facebook home page).
2. Find the “suggest photos of me to friends setting” (under “things others share”) and click on the button.
3. Once the “Photos Suggest Tags” box is open then click on the drop-down menu marked “Enabled” and change it to “Disabled”.

If the options above are not available to you then the feature has not yet been rolled out on your account (Facebook is rolling out this feature worldwide). In this case it may be a good idea to set a diary reminder to check in a couple of days – or you can wait until someone has helpfully tagged you in a (hopefully unembarrassing) photo…

Posted via email from #webshadows

Posted via email from #webshadows

It's becoming almost impossible to hide from the network...

It turns out that Facebook’s mapping of the world’s social connections goes beyond even its 500 million+ members.

In an interesting little experiment, the BBC’s Technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones demonstrates that it knows a fair bit about you even if you haven’t signed up yet.

He sets up a profile for a friend who has not used Facebook at all before and it suggests friends based on existing members who have emailed her before.

You can read more about the experiment on Rory’s blog.

This actually solves, or confirms the solution to something that puzzled me for a while. I’d done some PR work a long time ago for a private individual some years ago and Facebook kept suggesting that I should be their friend, and yet there were no connections at all in our networks.

After a while I realised that my webmail account which I log into Facebook with was most likely where the service was able to make the connection. Still it felt eery.

Rory also points out that this shows how it is possible to to set up a profile for somone without your actual permission – another example of online identity theft risk.

The moral of the story? As I say in the second rule of Me and My Web Shadow: Be the best and first source of information about yourself. That means even if you don’t want to be an active Facebook user, you should establish your online profile so that people can find you.

Facebook is increasingly being used as a kind of form of identification online now for other web services too, so securing your Facebook profile should really be part of guarding your online identity.

And after all, if Facebook knows who you are and who you know anyway, what’s the point in staying off of the network?

Is there enough information about you on the web for someone to steal your identity? Very possibly.

Is there enough information available by phoning around or going through your bins. Definitely.

A blog post on the social networks, security, privacy and identity theft by New Statesman journalist Jason Stamper is well worth a read. Jason carried out his own experiment, using publicly available Foursquare and social network information to build up a profile of a stranger.

By way of illustration, I searched Foursquare for people who had “checked in” their home address — telling the world exactly where they live and also displaying it on a handy map. I soon found an attractive 20-something year-old advertising agency executive, who had posted the address of her London flat. She had also “checked in” at her workplace, so I also knew where she worked and for whom.

He goes on to discuss issues around ID theft…

It’s no laughing matter: identity theft is on the rise. It costs the British economy an estimated £1.7bn a year, with the number of Brits falling victim to identity theft jumping 23 per cent in the first quarter of this year alone, according to fraud prevention service CIFAS.

He quotes James Jones of UK credit information company, Experian:

“There is a huge disconnect between the privacy we crave and the information we give away on social networks. It’s hardly surprising that identity fraudsters have been cashing in.”

That disconnect is a result of the difficult balancing act most people are attempting when they use the social web. We are benefitting from having a public identity and being able to connect with others, but in doing so we have to make ourselves, and our personal data, a little more public.

Before we get too nervous, it is worth remembering that identity theft pre-dates the mainstream use of social networks like Facebook. Identity thieves, private investigators and for that matter journalists have always found ways to elicit personal information by hacking voicemail accounts, or pretending to be other people and calling up banks and utility firms to get the information they need or just .

Some of the approaches and advice from Me and My Web Shadow is relevant for people worried about this:

• Draw a line between public and private: We all need to be clear about what information we are and aren’t happy to share. Some are happy to share almost everything about themselves, others just the bare minimum of professional information. It helps if we have thought through and almost have our personal policy in place.
• Remember that you are always on the record: Posting your personal information on social networks even when you think or feel you are in a private space isn’t a good idea. Some people I know even avoid posting their phone numbers in the private direct messages on Twitter in case this becomes public.
• Audit / review your personal online presence: Especially if you have a large number of connections online on services like Facebook, it is easy to lose track of who has access to what information. It pays, I think, it have a regular review every six months of who can see what, how contacts are grouped when you share information etc.
• Use a credit scoring alerts service: The main concern for most people regarding identity theft is that people will commit fraud using their name.  to check when someone might be using your identity to apply for credit – Experian’s own CreditExpert is very good in the UK and equivalent services are available in most countries.

Bottom line – we need to be careful online just as we are offline with our personal information. It is worth thinking about how much information we share online carefully, just as we need to think about how we get rid of paper bank statements or who might hear or see our PIN number.

Don’t panic. But don’t be too laid back about your personal information online either.

Last night I gave a talk to the brilliant Digital Surrey group about Me and My Web Shadow, the slides from which are (practising what I preach) now available on SlideShare.

Kerry from Dell has kindly shared her notes on her Posterous if you want to read a bit about what was said…

It was a really wonderful evening, as there was a lot of debate and interesting questions and I was sorry when  I had to leave the post-event pub meet-up to get bck to Brighton. If you live in the Surrey area you should definitely consider getting along to one of future Digital Surreyevents.

Thanks especially to The Blue Door PR, who organised the event, helped me sell a lot of books (thanks to everyone who bought one too) and are a formidable team of organisers/make-things-happeners…

: : Bonus link: James Firth has written a (very kind) account of last night’s talk and builds on some of the themes with his own perspectives and experiences…

: : New link: Paul Marden has shared his thoughts on talk and sharing at hisOrcare blog.

Posted via email from #webshadows