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?"

Comments

Yes, and use a one-time-only address

[jfruh]

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.

Re:Privacy is an illusion

[cayenne8]

They already have or can gain easy access to all that information. The govt already has a ton of info on you, tax records, dmv, etc. Business do also (you prolly get junk mail every day addressed to you.) It's a fact of life, it sucks, but thinking you can erase or hide your digital or paper trail is foolish. If you want to protect privacy spend your time fighting to protect it, don't waste it trying to hide.

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.