YouTube prankster makes you think twice about privacy.

A YouTube prankster has highlighted the privacy disconnect that still exists between social media and the real world.

Anyone who regularly reads our posts will understand that locking down your Facebook profile is an absolute must in this day and age.

But a YouTube social media “experiment” (video below) has highlighted that there is still a significant lack of understanding about the connection between what information you make public on social media and its potential consequences in the real world.

Jack Vale, a popular YouTuber known for playing pranks on an unsuspecting public, set up an experiment that involved him approaching unwary strangers on the street armed with information he attained about them that was publicly available on their personal profiles.

Whilst Jack Vale did navigate to the person’s personal profile, the information he obtained was posted with no privacy settings. In other words, it was set to public. A fundamental social media no-no.

As he stunned the people he met on the street with a plethora of personal knowledge about them, not a single person was able to realise that he was acquiring the information simply by reading the public information on their social media accounts, including Facebook and Instagram.

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Not only does it highlight that many social media users are still not utilising their privacy settings in the way that they should do, it also serves to show that such people are simply not aware that the information they post publicly is out there for anyone to see, thus were unable to see the connection between their online accounts and the information Vale was giving them.

One stranger in the video gave the perfect example of total obliviousness to social media ignorance, threatening to call the police on Vale for “invading my privacy” when all Vale actually did was read the public information on the strangers profile page.

You won’t get an arrest out of that.

The information that scammers can acquire from your personal social media accounts can be used for a lot more nefarious reasons than freaking you out in a YouTube video. So understand how you can get your privacy settings sorted (here) and understand how it can affect you in the real world.

See the video below.

Vale reveals all after the initial “spooking out” which you can see here.