Securing your digital activism
Social media has many benefits, but with it also comes with security and legal risks, making organizations, groups and individuals vulnerable.
Here are a few guidelines you can use as a standard guide to secure your digital activism, protect your organization’s accounts and your personal profiles.
- Assign roles & responsibilities: Training staff and volunteers on their roles and responsibilities on social networks is critical to avoid security breaches or private information leakage. The person in charge of your social networks should be trained on how to use the platforms securely. Make sure they read the privacy rules carefully.
- Understand social network privacy settings: Each social media platform has security, privacy settings and policies that are updated frequently, often with little or no notice. If you don’t update your security settings, your organization, your group or your personal account data could be used in ways you don’t intend.
- Never assume your privacy is protected: Get familiarized with a social network’s “default” privacy setting and adjust the security settings to your needs.
- Do not underestimate how things can be shared: Never post anything on blogs or social media if you are not willing to have it seen publicly. Once the post is shared you will have no control over it proliferating.
- Be cautious with how much information you share: Avoid oversharing sensitive information, posting photos containing sensitive information in the background (it is very easy to zoom into a paper or a computer screen) and personal information. Social networks have full ownership of your photos, posts and anything else connected to your profile, and can use those without your permission.
- Users and passwords: The more passwords and accounts your organization or group has, the bigger the security and privacy threats. Having a limited number of users managing your social media pages and maintaining strong and complex passwords is critical to avoid the unauthorized use of accounts. Change your passwords several times a year and use strong passwords for all of your accounts (a mix of capital, lower case letters, and numbers).
- Privacy rights: Maintaining the privacy of your allies, staff, network, beneficiaries, members, volunteers and staff is critical. Personal information, photos and quotes should only be shared with consent. Protecting addresses, dates of birth, personal emails and phone numbers by limiting staff and volunteer access to the information is important to prevent unintended sharing of confidential information.
For more information and resources securing your presence online, click here.