Friday 6 January 2012

Twitter Privacy Settings – A “How-To” Guide

Following on from my last two posts about the security settings on Facebook & Google+, I thought i'd take a look at Twitter's. A lot of users have recently started switching from Facebook to Twitter due to Facebook's new complicated changes associated with their new Timeline feature.
As a lot of these users are preteens and teenagers I wanted to show you a way of making them safer.
Before I learnt how to restrict who followed me on Twitter, I clicked on my followers one day and was quite surprised that quite a few were from sex websites (although at first glance appeared to be genuine people). The problem with not checking who is following you or restricting who does, is that anyone who can see your profile can also see your followers and can easily click on the links included in their profiles. Another problem is that if the account is not set to private and your child is identifying the location of where they're posting from, it leaves them vulnerable to predators.

Once you log into Twitter, you'll see Tweets from all the different people/organisations you have chosen to “follow” & receive updates from. To change your privacy settings, click on the silhouette of the person in the top right hand corner and select “settings” from the drop down menu. 


Under the “Account” heading, you can choose to make your profile private or public along with other options. Below is a screenshot to show which is the best options to select if you child uses Twitter:
 
If you have already included your location in previous tweets, you won’t need to go back through them all and delete them, just click on the link on the same settings page as above:
 
Don’t forget to click “Save” and that’s it really. Just don’t forget to have a chat with you kids about the types of things they shouldn’t post – on ANY social network! I hope you’ve found this information useful if you didn’t already know about it, please spread the word!

Thanks For Reading
@Lizmundo

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