5 Tips for Safe Tweeting
September 18, 2009 – 9:00 amBelow we’ve put together 5 tips that we think will help you to ensure a safe Twitter experience!
- Think about what you tweet before you tweet! At the moment there’s no way of deleting or removing and public tweets.
Personal Information – never share any personal information (phone numbers, house address, email address, etc). Tweets are public so they can be accessed by anyone and will come up in search results on a search engine. You don’t want your details to get into the wrong hands! If you have to share some personal information use the Direct Message feature. Once the message is sent you can delete it. When deleted the email will also be removed from the recipients account. However, the email will not be deleted from any third party applications or mobile devices that the recipient is using.- If you use the SMS (text message) function on your mobile to tweet be aware that you cannot use this function to tweet privately (Direct Message). All SMS tweets will be public.
- Use well constructed passwords (see links at bottom for password advice) and change them regularly. Keep your username and password to yourself. Ensure that you use as little third party applications as possible. If you do use them make sure they support Open Authentication. A good sign for safety is to look for http://twitter.com/oauth at the beginning of the address.
- It can be a good idea to use a Twitter client (e.g. TweetDeck) or a browser extension service like LongUrl. Long URL and other services similar to it allow you to view a links true location after it’s been shortened. This will be of great help because many URL shortening services are impossible to read and to identify the links true location just by looking at it. Therefore many scammers will copy the link into a shortener and say it’s one website but in fact it’s a completely different one which may be harmful. Here’s an example…check out this picture of me at the beach http://followthis.info/Ic07EDh, where in fact the link sends you to the BBC Sport website. With things like this it’s safer to not click the link if you’re not sure of the safety. If you do discover the link is a scam let them know in a message..they may not realise so you’ll be doing them a favour!
Password Tips:
What makes a good password?
How to make your password strong and easy to remember!
How not to create a password!
Passwords – Keep it quiet!
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Tags: advice, browser extension, help, open authentication, safe, safety, Tips, tweet, twitter, twitter client
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