Social Media and You – Out of the Mouths of Lawyers (Part 1):

(Upfront, I apologize for the length of the post and that it turned into a bit of how-to. This certainly won’t be the trend, but as you’ll read, this is something that’s come up enough recently that I thought I’d spend some time on it. Plus, I just got carried away =P)

For my first non-introductory entry, I thought I’d tackle some of the issues surrounding social media, specifically Facebook but also equally applicable to a site like Twitter – partially because I love both of them and also because I don’t want you to run away screaming when I start waxing philosophical… yet. You might be thinking to yourself, “Geez, I’m on someone’s blog, of COURSE I know about social networking sites!” However, this conversation has come up several times for me recently, including yesterday with a nice lawyer I was sitting with on the plane from Boston to Atlanta (ironically while I was writing yesterday’s inaugural blog post) who mentioned that the first thing she does when handling a lawsuit is to look up the defendant on Facebook. She went on to say that more than once what she’s found on someone’s Facebook page has prompted her to call the opposing counsel to see if they already wanted to settle. Have your attention yet? Good. Now, there are some really simple things you may be overlooking that could be very important when it comes to your social media.

The main issue with these kinds of websites is privacy. The first thing to note is that with social networking you basically have none. That’s right, I went there. NONE. Stop to consider that for a second because it’s kind of a big deal. Well, at least it’s as big of a deal as you make it insofar as how much you want the world to know. Facebook is probably the biggest example and convergence of internet privacy issues to date. In a world where we are constantly linked-in to the internet with laptops, netbooks, iPads (which are so freakin’ shiny!), smartphones, and the like, a site like Facebook is literally at the world’s fingertips at the drop of a hat. This in and of itself is not a problem, but it can become a huge one if you’re not aware of what it is that you’re doing.

I guarantee you that 90% of the people you know have never even looked at their privacy settings in Facebook. The privacy settings allow you to limit what other people can see at varying degrees of freedom away from you (i.e. your friends versus friends of friends that you awkwardly know because of that one time at that one party with that incident on the table that you don’t like to talk about versus other people in your network that you’re not friends with at all because they’re total creepers) and can be found under the “Account” drop-down menu.


From there the most important options, at least in my opinion, are found under Personal Information and Posts.


When you get inside that menu, you can see that you can hide almost anything on your profile page. What might be slightly more surprising is how much you haven’t hidden already (unless you happen to already be technologically conscious and if so, congratulations. Have a cookie!).


Keep in mind that most people on almost any Facebook network can see anything that’s not specifically hidden. Even if you have your different posts and photos limited to within your network, this is no longer even a guarantee. Waaaaaaay back when, as in when I started college in 2005, Facebook used to only be for those who had access to valid university email addresses. Moreover, a specific email address would only gain you access to that particular university’s network. These days, however, anyone can join pretty much any network if you a valid email address. And I mean ANYone. What this means is that if you want to keep your Facebook profile relatively private, you HAVE to limit access to your content to pretty much just your friends.

This is not to say that people who aren’t friends with you yet won’t be able to see anything about you when they search. It just means they’ll be able to see significantly less than one of your friends. If you want to check and see what different people can see, the “Preview My Profile” button up in the corner.


From there you’ll be able to see the default page that people within Facebook see when they search for you, say if they were going to add you as a friend. Take a look around and see what it is that you’ve left open. Make sure to pay special attention to your different photos and albums. While the other privacy settings are fairly straightforward, your pictures could turn out to be a disaster. In order to hide all of your pictures, you have to go through and set the privacy settings for each individual album. That means if you have 20 albums, you’re going to have to go through 20 times and set the privacy for each one to only be for the viewing pleasure and ridicule of your friends.

Another thing that you might want to do is to take a look at what specific friends see on your page. You can do this by typing a friend’s name into the box at the top of the preview page.


This is especially useful if you want to marginally but not completely limit access to certain people. I’ve found this to be an ideal fix for parents and family members who have ninja-ed their way into Facebook. I say ninja-ed, of course, because when I first started using Facebook it was limited to only college students, and it was a big part of the college experience that’s supposed to be getting you away from your family. At any rate, you may feel bad for rejecting the friend request from your mom or even your grandmother (oh yes, there’s a good chance that at least one of your friends’ grandparents is on Facebook and yes, it boggles the mind) but there may be certain things that you don’t want them to see. Using the preview button, you can take a look at what it is that they can see on your page. If there’s something that they have access to that you DON’T want them to see, you can go back to the privacy settings and make an exception for a particular content area. For instance, you might let all of your friends see the posts on your wall, except for your mom (would you believe that this was the first thing that I did when my mom added me on Facebook? Of course you would!). You can make that exception through the drop down menu. You can also create full lists of friends to make an exception for. This is also useful for those of us in grad school who have students that we TA for who are just trying to be friendly and we don’t want to reject but want to maintain professional distance as well.

Alright. So there you have a good background guide to Facebook privacy. Again, sorry it turned out to be a bit how-to-ish. In part 2, we'll look at the more practical side of why it is that you should care about your privacy at all instead of letting it all hang out for the world to see.