The Entrepreneur Life

Tag: privacy

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
    LinkedIn-Edit-Profile
  3. Scrolling down to the contact info section (above) and choosing the Edit (pencil icon) again
    LinkedIn-Contact-Info
  4. Clicking on the eye icon to now actually select the desired settings for your birthday
    LinkIn-BDay-Options

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!

 

What I’ve been reading this last week

books-education-school-literature-51342.jpegAs with so many other folks,  I’m trying to spend less time on my phone and computer reading the news obsessively. Yet there’s ever more great reading out there and accessible in ways we haven’t had before. But discovering, reading, assimilating and internalizing even a fraction of what we’d like is hard.  Yes, technology like Pocket and GoodReads help, but it’s still a firehose.

Om Malik, tech journalist and blogger extraordinaire has always been a regular source of great readings as has Brad Feld, venture capitalist, and all-around inspiring human. Inspired by their example, I’ve resolved to share interesting things that I’m reading each month. Hopefully, you’ll find it interesting and useful. Share your own thoughts on what you’ve been reading and enjoying.

Practice learning from history  Despite trying to maintain a reading diet low in politics, I found this piece I’m a law professor, and I teach my students how to destroy American democracy by Ozan Varol fascinating. Despite its click-bait title, Ozan’s premise draws from a business strategy formulation process at Merck. CEO Kenneth Frazier wanting to promote innovation asked his employees “to generate ideas to destroy Merck and figure out how to put Merck out of business. The executives then reversed their roles and crafted strategies to avert these threats.

When Ozan had his class run a similar exercise, he states “The exercise made the urgency of action clear. In this century, the threat to democracy will come, not from military coups or openly repressive dictators, but from elected politicians in seemingly democratic countries who gradually roll out an authoritarian agenda. The students realized the importance of remaining vigilant against these strategies and actively resisting them through legal, political, and social means.” Read the full piece here.

“What privacy?” in the era of Alexa Om is the one who turned me on to this Gizmodo article  The House That Spied on Me by Kashmir Hill and Surya Mattu. On one hand, I was fascinated by how much a journalist is prepared to do and (over) share for a story and on the other scared witless by the amount of data that’s being gathered and shared shredding any last illusions I had about privacy. The scariest part for me personally is the sheer number of my friends, who seem to have made Alexa and her competitors an integral part of their lives. Read the full piece here.

Before the rest of us feel too comfortable read this bonus piece on how fitness trackers share information that you might not want them to.

Skilling ourselves One of the joys of working young people is that I learn a lot from them. In turn, you get to see them handling, sometimes better and at other times no worse, issues we’ve faced in our own lives. Of course, a common question that pops up from nearly everyone – from young adults to middle-aged folks, is the issue of what do I want in life? I found this article on Don’t Know What You Want? Improve These 7 Universal Skills by Darius Foroux quite useful. If like many others you’re still looking for your true purpose. Check out the complete article here.

In summary

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