Protect Your Information on Social Media

Social media, like any online platform, can be the target of online scams and information theft.

To protect yourself, it is best to limit the amount of personal information you share on social media, regularly review your social media accounts and remove any publicly posted personal information.

Just as you wouldn't put a sign in your front yard saying, “Off to Hawaii for two weeks—empty house!,” you should manage your public profile with the mindset that criminals may be taking any information found there to use against you. Or against Carilion.

To keep your information secure online, we have put together a checklist of information security best practices for social media:

• Regularly check and update your security settings. Each platform has its own settings and it is important to regularly check how much information is being shown to your friends and followers. Make sure information like your phone number, address and email are not listed publicly and update your settings accordingly.
• Be careful what you share publicly. Never share information like your phone number, address and email publicly in a social media post or comment. If you have to share any personal information with a friend or a company on social media, ask them to take the conversation to a private message.
• Regularly go through your friends and followers list and weed out any potential spam accounts. Be careful of accepting spam accounts that may be pretending to be someone you know. If you come across a spam account that may be impersonating a friend or a loved one, let that person know right away and report the account to the platform.
• Do a frequent background check on yourself on social media to see what information is posted about you online. Delete any information that is no longer accurate and delete any personal abandoned social media accounts.
• Be cautious of clicking links on social media. Just like emails, scammers will use links on social media to bait you into clicking on their harmful links. If you get a vague message from a friend sharing a link, they may have been hacked. Do not click on the link and contact your friend as soon as possible so they can report the security breach to the social media platform.
• Check and make sure there are no spam accounts created in your name. If you come across a spam account, you can report the impersonation account to the platform directly and they will remove the account on your behalf.
• Always be professional and courteous on social media. There is no permanent delete button on social media. Anyone can take a screenshot of a comment or post you have made, even if you have removed it from the platform, and share it for the whole world to see. If you would not want something you said on social media to be printed on the front page of the newspaper, you probably should not post it.
• When you're on social media, be mindful of what you are posting, especially if it is about your work or includes photos of you in your work environment. The confidentiality of our patients’ protected health information, our employees’ confidential information and Carilion’s proprietary information is always to be maintained and such information is not to be disclosed.

For more social media best practices, check out our employee social media policy.