Scams using personal information prompt closer scrutiny of online sharing

A recent scam targeting young women on the Lower Mainland has prompted some people to reconsider how much they share on social media.

RCMP say the scam involved a caller who identifies a woman by her name, address and other personal details, then demands the woman engage in sexually explicit conversation with him. Police said some of the information could have been gathered through social media sources.

Rina Liddle, the owner of a social media marketing agency, says there's really no such thing as a privacysetting on asocial media account so share accordingly.

"I approach it in the way that I would never share anything that I wouldn't want public in the first place," said Liddle.

"None of my contact information [or] my private contact information is up there. Just my business contact information. And that's what I tell my clients."

Liddle says people often end up feeling a false sense of community on social media where they become more and more comfortable sharing personal details with a large network of people.

They might have set their privacy functions to just friends, but forget about things like screen capture or third party applications that can share posts and personal information to a much wider audience.

A culture of oversharing

Jesse Miller, a social media consultant, says restricting what people share on social media is easier said than done.

"The reality is we as people overshare all the time online and in that, it is very hard to take back aspects of how we've shared information of where we've gone to school, where we've lived, the community that we live in and how we share our extracurriculars as well," Miller said.

Even social behaviour generally considered fairly innocuous like posing for a picture with your gym's CrossFit group, for example can end up being shared and reshared on different social networks.

"That company has that ability to share you and [someone now] has the ability to put the pieces together to identify where you are and where you spend your time," he said.

Someone with predatory behaviours can use these inadvertently shared social media posts to put together a fairly complete picture of your life, Miller said.

Changing social norms

Miller said some work has to be done to change the social norms around sharing personal information.

"One of the things I work with kids a lot on is digital consent. We're teaching kids to start asking for permission before they take a photo or asking a person how they feel about an image that gets shared online," he said.

This kind of courtesy should extend to adults.

"We have to start advocating more for people's personal safety on social media, especially adults who feel vulnerable," Miller said.

"Just because everybody else is doing it, doesn't mean you don't have the right to say I don't want that information out there."

With files from B.C. Almanac