What happens to your online profile when you’re gone?

Three Facebook users die every minute for a total of 1.78 million Facebook users in 2011, what is the future of your digital self?

You might not know what happens when you die but you can control what happens online!

You are filling the internet with status updates, image and video creating new digital dilemmas such as:

Whether you want to live forever online?
How to protect your privacy after death?
How to maintain your digital legacy?
Who to appoint as your digital executor?
Whether You Would Want to Be Digitally Resurrected

Do you know the death policies of all your online accounts?

 

10 Things To Know About Liability In The Social Media World

With the explosion of websites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, in-house counsel should give careful consideration to the unique problems social media presents, how it affects the workplace, and how to address employees’ and third parties’ social media usage.

As with the rise of the Internet and blogs, existing employee and intellectual property issues play out in the social media world in sometimes surprising ways, creating new challenges and problems for in-house counsel. Social media has the capability to dramatically increase these problems and challenges by providing a much larger, well-connected audience. The following are some specific, brief considerations that in-house counsel should analyze and address with company employees.

1. Secrets are gone in a flash (or click).
2. Employee posts in social media may be protected speech
.
3. Employee posts may subject the company to liability.
4. Employee posts may prompt federal administrative action.
5. Social media provides an exponentially bigger, real-time audience for traditional employee-relations problems.
6. Using social media as a recruiting tool can backfire.
7. Registering user names is a cost-effective, protective measure.
8. Implementing social media policies is becoming a best practice
9. The best defense is a good offense
.
10. Social media adds litigation considerations.

Read More

Study Predicts Growing Use Of Social Media In Healthcare

A recent study concluded that social media would continue to be a factor for healthcare providers and consumers while at the same time, ambiguous regulations, privacy concerns and a host of other factors limit how patients and healthcare providers use social media

Once these hurdles are overcome, the PwC report said, social media “will open new opportunities to improve health delivery and outcomes

Read full article

Goodbye Facebook Places

Less than a year after Facebook deployed “Places” to compete with Foursquare and Gowalla, Facebook is pulling the plug on Places over the next few weeks.

Despite its 750 million members, Facebook could not leverage its mass to make “places” work

Facebook Places never really got much traction compared to other self standing geolocalization platforms like Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla and other niche platforms.  Places though is not going the way of the dinosaurs, Facebook opted to integrate the localization feature directly in the post, on the wall.

The new feature will allow any user to tag locations in their posts.  They won’t need a smart phone or be near the place for that matter.  They will be able to use the feature from a computer, tablet or any other device giving them access to the internet using the “Places” icon at the bottom of the post

What does that mean for users.  As Facebook changed its aim from Foursquare to Groupon with the deployment of the Facebook “Deals”, we can expect a closer integration of “Deals” with the posts and more online offers.  Hopefully these offers will not clog the wall

Good news though, after the uproar on Facebook privacy settings and the bad habit Facebook had to make new features “opt-out”, Facebook seems to have listened to users and the location feature will be “opt-in”

Who knows, they may even start a new trend that will lead more companies to adopt the “opt-in” model rather that the “opt-out” model.

Coming soon, major revamp of Facebook privacy settings

Facebook maybe listening after all, or is it the influence of Google +.

In the next couple of days, Facebook will release a major revamp of the privacy settings.

The revamp will affect both the profile and the way others share information about you as well as how your posts, images… are shared.

The privacy settings, although extensive were still confusing and somewhat hidden under the “account” tab.

The new privacy settings will be on the profile page (in the edit section), more intuitive, you will be able to decide who sees what on your profile section by section

When it comes to sharing, Facebook is implementing a number of new changes and making them easier to understand and apply.

  • You will be able to tag anybody if they are on Facebook, not just your friends.  When you do so, the person tagged will receive a notice and will have the option to accept or remove the tag
  • You can set your settings to allow your friends to tag you without your approval (I would not recommend it though)
  • Before you post anything to your wall, you will see a drop down menu that will allow you to decide who sees the content (public, friends or custom).
  • A little known privacy feature allowed users to control tags in the past.  In the new version, when somebody tags you, you will have the option to remove the tag, ask the person who posted the tag to remove the photo or video or block the person.

Facebook privacy settings are quite extensive but you still have to take the time to learn them and understand how they work and use them accordingly.