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Ask Slashdot: Facebook, Twitter For Business, Is It Worth the Privacy Trade-Off?
cayenne8 writes "I've been a staunch advocate of NOT joining Facebook or Twitter or the other social networks to protect my privacy and to not voluntarily give all my personal information away to corporate America, or even the Government. However, I'm beginning to look into making money through various means on the side, one of them being photography/videography. With these mediums, being seen is critically important. Having a business facing site on Facebook/Google+ and even using Twitter can be great for self promotion, and can open up your business to a huge audience. If you were to open your FB and other social network accounts with business ONLY information, and keep your personal information (name, image, etc) off the Facebook account...will this keep your personal privacy still from them, or are their algorithms good enough to piece together who you are from the business only sites? Is the payoff worth the potential trade-off for generating potential customers for your business and guiding them to your primary website?"
See all those sites you visit with a facebook like button. Those images are usually served from facebook, not the site you're visiting.
So, unless you're careful with your privacy settings, you are likely reporting a huge amount of your browsing to facebook.
At the very least, I'd recommend logging out of facebook when you're done and trying to browse with 3rd party cookies disabled.
Having a social media presence is pretty crucial to doing the sort of freelance work you're describing, since so much of how you get business happens via word of mouth (and so much of "word of mouth" happens on social media).
One of the simplest things you can do to protect your privacy is to create an email addres that you *only* use for social media accounts (like, a special gmail address that just forwards mail to your regular adress, or maybe facebook@yourdomain.com if you own your own domain). This rather horrifying article from the WSJ about the way that social media tracking work makes clear that your email address is a big part of how your identity is tracked online. If they can't match the email address you use for your Facebook login with any other aspects of your online identity, you have some protections.
If you're using them strictly as a business tool, I wouldn't worry too much about photos -- I do think it's helpful to have a photo of yourself, especially in a one-to-one business like freelance photography. You can set your Facebook account so other people can't tag you in their photos.
You want to start working freelance and you don't want to publicize how people can reach you? I'd expect a decent head shot, a phone number, a short bio and an email address. Also representative galleries of past work, as well.
You don't have to put your life story out there, but it's really not uncommon in business to have some small amount of "About Me" information posted with experience, education, sometimes martial status/number of children (especially if you are looking to photograph families/children).
If you are going to set up a social media presence, you can't just set up a page and have it sit there. It does require tending and maintenance or it looks abandoned. If you do photography, post examples of good work at a steady pace, even if it's not paying gigs. Hopefully people forward it around and you get some notice.
It sounds like you need to loosen up, or find another way of making money on the side that doesn't require social media. You can be a successful freelander without it, but you will still need to get your name out there somehow (personal networking, business networking groups, etc)
Ghostery blocks them
I think Twitter is worth it because there are very few privacy concerns. Twitter is 98% public, and everyone who participates knows it. (I hope.)
Facebook is a privacy nightmare, and is crap for driving business to your web site. It does everything it can to keep all information on Facebook, including jerking everyone around. And that will only increase.
Once you post something on either service it's out of y our control. With Twitter it's pretty minor, 140 characters, and it will be gone eventually. (I believe they only archive the last 2000 Tweets or so.) Facebook is trying to make a timeline of people's entire lives and won't stop trying to make money off your content until well after you're dead.
Well, actually....after Katrina, I fell off a LOT of lists, and over the years, I've been pretty careful to not put my personal name out there again. I get very little junk snail mail. Over the past year, I've gotten a few. But moving around so much after the storm, addresses changed often, and I was lax in catching up most anything to those.
Heck, even now, my car registration says out Parish, my drivers license say another one and another address, from the parish I currently live in right now.
Registering for voting was a fun exercise, let me assure you that.
No, I'm not invisible by any stretch of the imagination, but I also don't go out of my way to give information out to companies out there, I actually go out of my way to give disinfromaton whenever I can. Customer store cards, in some I'm a 98 yr old Hispanic lady name Sven, whose shopping habits HAVE to skew their system a bit, and most any time I fill out anything that isn't legal, I fudge the years and dates around, give out wrong or partially wrong names, etc. Anything that goes into a non-legal database usually has misguided information about me, but often to the correct address.
It is funny to see some junk mail that arrives here that comes from the fscked up data I give them.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........