I woke up today with Radio 5 covering the following story “MI6 boss in Facebook entry row”. My first thoughts were how did this happen? Had the next MI6 Bosses wife friended reporters from The Mail on Sunday? Had she not set her privacy settings correctly?
Well the answer was the later, “She had not imposed privacy protection on her account, allowing any of Facebook's 200 million users in the open-access "London" network to see the entries, it added.”
Now there are calls from politicians and security experts for an inquiry to what happened, and the security implications. Well let me save them some money and more importantly the tax payer some money from a lengthy inquiry. They can look at the security implications for the new boss and his family. I’ll tell them what happened. It basically falls down to a lack of education. That’s it, nothing else.
You can’t stop the families of these “V.I.P’s” from using the social networks that everyone else is using. What you can do is educate them. Tell them how to set their privacy settings, not to friend people left right and centre, to also think about what they are posting.
But I should point out that it’s not just the families of the “V.I.P.’s” that need educating I think everyone needs to be educated. Especially our young. How many times have we seen stories of teenagers falling foul of something they have posted on a social media site of some sort? Surely at our schools and collages there should be a compulsory lesson or two about using social media sites. Within one of those lessons they should cover privacy settings, and protecting your identity. It’s the least we have to do to prepare our youth for a life online.
It’s not hard to get the information about setting the privacy settings on Facebook. A quick search on Google finds some good advice out there. So it seems pointless of me to re-write all this advice again. Here are a couple of links I think folks should read.
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