Maintaining Privacy in Social Media – An Ongoing Battle

I had been planning to write a piece on how folks are getting off of social media particularly Facebook—from the famous such as Om Malik to a lot of 18 to 29-year olds. Even when people choose to stay on networks (social or professional) it’s hard to maintain the degree of privacy or control they seek. It’s hard for at least two reasons

• there’s just a LOT of options, kinds of data, kinds of audiences an and
• companies just don’t make it easy for users to turn on or off something.

This became really evident when I tried to help a LinkedIn user yesterday to maintain some contact info private. You’ve have thought that you would go to Settings & Privacy, as I did, and fix it. Well, you’d be wrong, just as I was.

While I consider myself a technophile and an experienced user of LinkedIn – neither a dekko through their settings nor a Google search produced a reliable answer on, “How do I not reveal by birthdate on LinkedIn?” The nearest I got to was this Quora post, and of course, LinkedIn had changed things around again!

The changes range from explicitly leaving out the word Birthday from the options listing, which was tucked away under Contact Info, which was hidden (and not evident at all) under the Intro section of your profile.

and how to get to even this stage. It involved

1. Selecting View Profile from the Me menu on the top right
2. Then choosing the Edit (pencil icon) in the Intro section
   
3. Scrolling down to the contact info section (above) and choosing the Edit (pencil icon) again
   
4. Clicking on the eye icon to now actually select the desired settings for your birthday
   

It took me nearly 20 minutes to research, test and ensure this works before I could help the original LinkedIn user who’d sought my help. Not cool! LinkedIn you can do better than this!