Facebook Privacy Stories – the Daily Mail comments debacle

Remember, always be careful what you write online. It may get you in trouble.

We spend a great deal of time telling our readers how to keep their information private on social media sites like Facebook and what the potential ramifications are.

But even visiting websites outside the realms of social media can still lead to social media privacy nightmares, as one silly fella may have realised if the screenshot published by the Sabotage Times (below) is to be believed.

The screenshot, taken from the comments section of a Daily Mail article, shows one commenter making a rather unsafe-for-spouse comment highlighting his err… fondness, for a female.

However he clearly forgot his activity on the Daily Mail comments feature was linked to his Facebook account. And naturally his “other half” was a Facebook friend (but maybe not anymore.)

When you link such activity to your Facebook account, that activity is published as a Facebook story, available to your friends. And it appears that story was seen by people it shouldn’t have been, and… well, the rest is history.

This is not to say this particular incident couldn’t have been avoided however. Our commenter could have easily prevented this from happening by doing any number of things. He could have accessed his privacy settings and prevented the Daily Mail Online app from publishing anything from his account. Or he could have not linked his Facebook account to the Daily Mail website and created a separate account instead.

Or our commenter could have just refrained from making the comment altogether, which is arguably the better advice.

The point is, that like it or not, the grasp of sites like Facebook is growing outside the scope of Facebook itself, which means we have to be extremely careful about what we write anywhere online. The Internet has never been more social, and it’s not going to backtrack any time soon.

So this means refraining from publishing stuff online that you don’t want falling into the wrong hands, or, if that’s not an option, at least understanding and remembering how social media works so this sort of thing doesn’t happen!