Safety in the Web

This is an article published in 20120923 The Sunday Times Reflect 16.

It's been increasing common that people post their lives (& happenings around them) in the web, in particular, in social media platforms like Facebook and Youtube. It's a place that people share their joy with others, or share some discoveries, etc with others. Of course, there are also people who wish to leverage on this platform to increase their publicity (or network) for various purposes.

In this article, I guess the writer's concern is not unfounded. In fact, the "careless" posting of family videos sometimes can bring about undesirable things and even dangers to the subjects who appear in the clip. There are also instances that kids (or even adults) are stalked.

I think it's important for one to exercise discretion on what's for self and what should be made available to others (a selected group or the public). To address to this, there is an increasing trend that more social media platforms are looking into this area and start providing features to allow one to decide on the visibility of content to selected group of audience. Unfortunately, not all are aware of this; and often, worse off, many are ignorant about the dangers being overly 'exposed'.

In some commonly used platforms:

---

• GoogleSites & GoogleDocs (including PICASA albums) - accessibility are managed via the "Shared" features. 
• Private - only accessible by self
• Share with selected group of people with varying rights
• Share with public such that it's searchable, or remain unsearchable (i.e. unlisted)

@GoogleApps

@PICASA albums (when linked with Google+)

---

• Blogger - the administrator could visibility and accessibility at various levels 
• Selected group of people to be viewers and/or authors (up to 100)
• Could be open to public to view

• On top of that we could also decide on the accessibility to "comment" 

---

• Youtube - the administrator could visibility and accessibility at various levels 
• Private - only accessible by self
• Share with selected group of people with varying rights
• Share with public such that it's searchable, or remain unsearchable (i.e. unlisted)

• This also applies to Playlist, too :)

---

•  Facebook - For any posts, including video clips and photo albums

•  In general, we can set the visibility at Friends, Public, or Only Me
• Apart from that, we can also create lists so that postings are only made viewable to selected group

---

• Google+ comes with the "Circles" feature which allows us to create groups of people to share posts with. This concept is similar to the Facebook list (I suppose). Well, I'm still quite new to Google+. I guess there are more to discover :)