What users do with their own and others’ content is just as big a privacy concern on the social Web as what a responsible social network site does with it. Certainly terms of use need to be looked at, but so do your own privacy options, people! Even privacy features can’t offer total control over what people do with your content, but they can help a lot – for example, they can keep it so that the photos in your MySpace or Facebook profiles (as long as they’re not copy and pasted elsewhere) can’t be searched with Google, Yahoo, and other search engines out on the Web. So take advantage of the degree of control privacy features give you. Here’s a video tutorial for Facebook’s users by my ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid, and here are little instructional videos for MySpace and Xanga too at GetNetWise.org. But remember, as Larry put it in his CNET post, “regardless of how you configure your privacy settings, there is a reality of the social Web that can’t be configured away. Any digital information that is posted can be copied, captured, cached, forwarded, and reposted by anyone who has access to it.”
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