How to Protect Your Privacy on the Web

12 tips for keeping yourself off the radar screen of privacy hackers

By J.D. Solomon
JDS Strategic Communications

Much of the concern about Internet privacy relates to ways that Website publishers obtain and use their visitors’ personal information. Ironically, though, when people find their privacy is breeched it is usually because of the personal information they have willingly posted, or allowed to be posted, on the World Wide Web.

One of the most common ways that people give up their privacy is by using social networking sites such as MySpace or Xanga. These sites are extremely popular with teenagers and young adults, and many members publish highly personal diaries along with pictures of themselves. For some reason, people using these or other blogging sites freely post messages about themselves and their families that they would surely be mortified to see on their school bulletin boards — or kitchen tables.

In the professional arena, personal privacy is frequently lost through the information that organizations routinely post online about employees, customers, directors, trustees, volunteers, etc. The vehicles are typically newsletters, press releases, captioned photographs, executive biographies, annual reports and other corporate documents. Remember: when distributed on paper, such documents have a limited reach and lifespan. But when published and archived on a Website they live forever, key-word searchable and freely accessible to everyone in the world.

Here are 12 tips for protecting your privacy, and the privacy of your staff and colleagues:

1. Create and publish a formal privacy policy for your organization. The policy should cover your own employees as well as your Website’s visitors. If you run a nonprofit, be sure to include references to members, volunteers and donors. Your business or trade association may have a model policy to emulate. There are also resources on the Web to help you get started; try http://www.the-dma.org/privacy/creating.shtml  and http://www.p3pwiz.com/.

2. Be careful about posting photographs online. It is virtually impossible to prevent someone from copying a photograph on your Website and using it for other purposes, including posting on another site.

3. Think twice about posting biographical information about employees. First, such postings are a favorite tool for competitors or headhunters trying to poach your valuable managers. Second, the personal information that these bios typically include (age, hometown, spouse’s name, number of children, etc.) can be damaging if accessed by someone with bad motives (identity thieves, con artists, plaintiff attorneys, old flames, and the like).

4. Don’t archive press releases about personnel appointments.

5. Newsletters tend to be filled with references to individuals. You should question the value of posting your newsletters online at all; if you do post them, resist the temptation to archive them on your Website. Also, just because you post your newsletters as PDFs doesn’t mean they can’t be indexed and searched. They can.

6. If you run a nonprofit, never post lists of your contributors without first getting their express consent.

7. Remove photo galleries and pictures of individuals from your site after a month, especially photos with identifying captions. Never post photographs of children with captions that identify them by name.

8. Think twice about posting staff email addresses, especially if you or your colleagues use your business email addresses for personal use or for Website user names. If your business email address must be posted, maintain a secondary email address for personal use and Web log-ins.

9. Be aware that pages you remove from your site remain accessible on the Web as digital detritus. Google, for instance, provides searchers with access to its own cached, or stored, versions of pages that may no longer be posted on the actual site. And at www.archive.org, you can use the Internet Wayback Machine to see websites as they appeared years ago.

10. Don’t use a universal password for all your online accounts. Instead, use two: one for low-level security sites such as Amazon, and another, more secure, password for banking, investment and other high-security sites.

11. Take a moment to caution your teenager about the importance of protecting their own privacy, and the family’s.

12. Periodically Google yourself to see where people can find you on the Web. Don’t hesitate to ask a Webmaster to remove your personal information from his or her site.