April 29, 2009
Posted by Ryan Graves
How To Practice Safe Twittering: 5 Simple Steps to Securing Your Twitter Experience
In an effort to be a resource for many of my friends who have recently joined Twitter I’ve decided to post a quick list of Twitter safety tips. Many of these tips carry over to other social networks but they are written here as specific to Twitter.
5 Twitter Safety Tips
- Never give out personal information via Tweets. When writing your profile information add your URL but be general with your location. I don’t like the iPhone generated latitude/longitude locations. Just use your city to stay safe. Email is usually safe enough but understand that if it’s on your Twitter profile, it’s in the public.
- Never give out your Twitter password. There are SO many applications that “need” your password, don’t give it to them. Twitter has even created a method for a 3rd party application to use your login credentials without getting to that data. Especially since this has come out no app should need your password. Any good application will now use this system below to verify the use of your Twitter login credentials.
- Just like anything else on the web, once you’ve posted it, it’s there for good. Make sure to be smart about sharing content. Especially pictures and other multi-media.
- Keep your profile information brief enough that your comfortable with any stranger knowing it. Unlike Facebook, anyone can follow you on Twitter, you have limited discretion on who follows you.
- If you ever plan to meet someone from Twitter offline (which I have done often and have found to be extremely valuable for networking) make sure you know about that person first. It helps to first have a phone conversation with that person and ask questions that only that person would know to make sure there’s no scamming being done.
5 Tips For Twittering Kids
- First, why are you tweeting, go sign-up for sports!
- Always tell your parents about any threats or negative Tweets and never ever arrange to meet someone offline.
- Only follow people that you know in real life.
- It may help to keep your Twitter feed private and “protect your updates”. This allows you grant permission to followers and gives you complete control over who views your Twitter feed.
- Pretend your parents are behind you on every Tweet!
