Every single thing you do online has an effect on you – from a post to a simple ‘like’.
You’re being followed everywhere.
Everything you do is tracked and used against you.
Nothing belongs to you.
You’re never alone.
Scared yet?
In this post, I’ll share 3 things you might not know about your online actions that affect you every single day.
Your Social Media Footprint Is Much More Than What You Post
When I train people on personal branding, I always ask them to clean house on their social media profiles.
This means deleting any compromising posts, pictures and videos (of course, once something is published, it is never truly deleted).
When they tell me they’re done, I say, “No, you’re not – go through your social media profiles and clean up every retweet, like, favorite, re-vine, re-gram, double tap, re-pin, share, etc.
Why go this far?
Because every person you follow on Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, Vine, Tumblr, Facebook – every person you retweet, re-pin, re-vine, re-gram, favorite, like, double tap defines who you are.
There are applications now who are devouring all of this data that create profiles about you and determine what you’re going to do next.
By what you do on social media, you’re creating a profile about yourself. This ‘profile’ is going to be used by companies looking at your résumé, and also in every other walk of life.
You need to go back and unfollow, unrewteet, unfavorite tweets from time to time because someone may see that and misconstrue who you are.
Every single one of your actions online represent you.
Your Texting Is Not Yours
A big thing many of us fail to realize on a daily basis is that once you send a text – once you hit that ‘send’ button on a text message – it’s gone.
It is no longer yours.
It no longer belongs to you.
I cannot emphasize this enough – especially young people.
You may think text messages are private and would never come back to bite you, but you have no idea what tomorrow holds. You have no idea who may turn their back on you tomorrow and share your personal text messages with the world.
Snapchat is a mobile app that allows your picture messages to disappear, and Mark Cuban has led the development for Cyber Dust, a texting application that deletes your texts shortly after they are viewed, so the texting world is moving toward a direction of being traceless…
But for the time being, it’s a good idea to CYA and not text anything compromising or that misrepresents you.
Nothing You See Online Is Random
When you search for something, do you truly think you’re getting a clean search?
If you do, you’re absolutely wrong.
Even after you clear your cookies, open a new browser, clear your search history and enter a search, your results are still catered to you.
You’ve gone from a point where you were a little bit concerned about cookies tracking your online actions to now where absolutely nothing you do online is private.
Unless you’re really naive, you understand that your privacy is disintegrating.
You’ve gone from a point where you could somewhat ‘control’ what was seen about you online, to where you almost have zero control over what is seen about your or said about you.
Seriously. Absolutely nothing you do online is private anymore. Nothing goes unseen.
You think Facebook ‘privacy’ settings really keep your stuff private? You think your email is only seen by your eyes? You think your every move on your phone, laptop and computer isn’t being tracked?
Ha – get real.
Every search you do is catered to you – to your interests, your geographic location, your IP address, your age group, your ethnicity, your demographic, etc.
Every time you open your Facebook feed, the timeline you see is catered around your actions and interests.
What I’m saying is that you and I could be born on the exact same day, both be males, both be Milwaukee-born, both be Hispanic, both be digital marketers, and both be fitness junkies, and we’d still see different results for similar things we search for online.
Why?
Because your moves and actions are tracked so finitely, it’s almost scary.
The internet & the platforms in it are not only tracking your actions, they’re reading your tendencies to predict what kind of stuff you’d like to see…it’s almost like they’re one step ahead of you.
Does this kind of stuff scare you? Do you think there are any ‘private’ areas online? Let me know in the comments below!
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