Watch what your share on Social Networks.

Recently a friend of mine posted a picture of themselves smoking weed on Facebook and it got me wondering. How much information about ourselves our letting out on the internet. Are we being too social with a bunch of strangers on social networks?  Our lives are now so dependently integrated with the internet that sometimes we do not stop and wonder its implications on our privacy. Shouldn’t we keep some parts of our lives to ourselves rather than sharing them with the whole world?

People have now become so keen on sharing every aspects of their lives on social networks that by just checking on someone’s Facebook page you can learn almost every aspect of their lives. Following them on Twitter will give you real time updates about what they are doing, even if it’s a simple silly thing such as eating a banana. Surely the world won’t lose much if other some information was kept private, no one wants to know that you ate a stale burger and spent a whole Tuesday throwing up. More so some employers now make it standard practice to do background checks of potential employees before hiring. So that picture of you binge drinking and snorting drugs won’t do much good for your job prospects. What we share online can later come back to haunt us in the future.

Justine Stucco lost her job after her racist insensitive tweet went viral online even her own father called her an “idiot.” Her employers, IAC, a major media company fired her and she went on to delete her Twitter account. A bit too late for that, but that just goes on to show that the less information shared the better, less is more.

Obviously as humans we enjoy sharing a good story or two but sometimes it can become a little too much. Hewlett Packard’s former VP, Scott McClellan gave away too much information on his LinkedIn profile which tipped off competitors on the company’s cloud computing services, resulting in a loss of revenue. Social networks have enabled people to gather information which traditionally required some undercover work to retrieve.

You need to be careful about what we are putting online, think before posting anything. You should make sure that what you post will not be revealing any secrets or anything that is likely to come back and torment you. Once something gets on the internet deleting it a few hours later won’t do you much good so post responsibly.