Managing Your Privacy

The moment that you create any online account, such as a blog or Facebook account, you should be thinking about protecting your privacy.

For example, when you created your blogger.com account, you created some important personal information such as your username and password.

Just as we encourage patrons to safeguard their library card number and 4-digit PIN, we too must keep our account information in a safe place and never share it with anyone, even with the Web 2.0 Training Team.

If we share this information with others, then we put ourselves at risk for identity theft. Consequently, any individual could potentially impersonate you through your social software accounts and steal more of your personal information.

Remember that once you create a social software account, your personal information, posts, etc. can be immediately published on the web. Therefore, this information can become immediately public and permanent and can be quickly and easily disseminated and searched by other people.

So how can we manage our privacy settings in blogger.com?

Here are some simple tips to gain control over your privacy:

A) Edit Your Profile in Blogger

In order to change your profile settings (for example, here you can select whether or not to show your real name and email address on your public blog), please follow these steps:

1. Log into your blogger.com account. Here you will be immediately signed into your “Dashboard.”
2. Find and click on “Edit Profile”
3. On the “Edit User” profile page, you will see “Privacy” and “Identity” settings.
4. Modify these settings to suit your needs.
5. Then don’t forget to scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on “Save Profile” to save your new changes.

B) Edit Your Settings in Blogger

1. Log into your blogger.com account. Here you will be immediately signed into your “Dashboard.”
2. Find and click on “Settings”
3. You will immediately see the “Basic” settings page. Scroll down to the question “Let search engines find your blog?” If you select “No” for this question (using the drop down menu), you are allowing people to view your blog. However, users will not be able to search for your blog using search engines like Google.
4. You can also experiment with other settings by clicking on “Publishing,” “Comments” and “Archiving” located near the top of the settings page. Modify these settings to suit your needs.

C) Edit Who Can See Your Blog

1. Log into your blogger.com account. Here you will be immediately signed into your “Dashboard.”
2. Find and click on “Settings”
3. Find and click on “Permissions” near the top of the page. In the box titled “Blog Readers,” you can give permission to certain users to see your blog. For example, you can allow anyone to see your blog, you can invite users to see your blog or you can restrict viewing to only the author(s) of your blog.

D) Privacy Resources

It is important to review any website’s privacy policy to learn what measures are taken (or not) to maintain users’ privacy. In particular, Facebook has been highly criticized and scrutinized for compromising users’ privacy.

For more information see: http://www.priv.gc.ca/media/nr-c/2010/nr-c_100127_e.cfm

Since blogger.com is a Google product, you can review Google’s privacy policy (which covers the blogger.com privacy policy) at: http://www.google.com/privacypolicy.html

For more information about privacy and social software, you can review the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s (OPCC) resources at: http://www.priv.gc.ca/information/social/index_e.cfm