Spare yourself a minute and try to remember the last time you spoke to someone who didn’t have a Facebook, Instagram or some sort of a social media profile. Almost impossible, isn’t it? Social Media has taken the world by storm and it has even taken the form of a ‘conversation starter’ whereby one can simply ask a person, “Hey, do you have Facebook?” and you’re half way there.
But what’s becoming scary is the sheer level of private and personal information people are now freely sharing on these social networking sites. Information which is irrelevant and doesn’t need to be known by anyone except yourself and your family, such as your date of birth, place of birth, your telephone number, is free to be viewed by many others in your ‘about me’ profile. If you do not have the right privacy settings, it’s pretty much public and for the whole world to see.
Being a part of a Private Detective team, this is fantastic news. The more you share publicly, the more you make it easy for us, Private Detectives. For example, if we are trying to locate someone, a job that we do extremely well, gone are the days when our team of Private Detectives would have to spend days and hours scrolling through endless databases. Now we can simply find your profile online, click on “lives in” and in a matter of a second, we have more than enough information to figure out your home address.
But good news for private detectives does not always mean that it is good news for the society as well. Simply put, in order to safeguard yourself, you simply shouldn’t list all your personal information online, for the world to see. As Private Detectives we do not understand why millions of people (most young adults) are sharing so much information online and removing all shreds of privacy they have left.
Last year, a news that revolved around Instagram said it out loud that any photograph that a user uploads to the Instagram blog, actually means that the up-loader is giving Instagram the permission to use the image themselves and the right to also sell them to a third party. Which means that anyone who has an Instagram blog could end up seeing their pictures/themselves being used in advertisements on sites like Facebook and later on in promoting products like Coca-Cola and Nike.
Does that mean you should say goodbye to our privacy online. Well, not really. Although you should place restrictions on who can see our information on Facebook and as for Instagram, you can always delete your account and instead upload your pictures on sites such as Flickr.
As Private Detectives, let us tell you something. If you do post your private information online to a social profile and there is someone out there who wants to gather information about your whereabouts – they can look for you and find you in a matter of a few clicks.