Your Privacy in Online Forums and Communities

In today's Internet lives, online communities have become a medium of exchange of information or general chatting and keeping up with friends. Whatever is your area of interest, you are most likely to be part of some online community. But how do you protect your privacy in this very open environment? This article aims in telling you just that.

One of the most important things you need to do before start using a community is to read its Privacy policies. This will give you a general idea about how much information you need to revel to the site and other privacy options available to you. You should also read the 'terms and conditions' of using the site which essentially tells you the policy of the community .If you find somebody who is breaking the community rules you can complain of them and they can be suspended or blocked from using the site. Once you are satisfied with these basic criteria you are ready to sign up for the site.

Most of the online communities require your full name and email address for creating your user account. If it is a social networking site it might even ask you to create your profile with many personal details like your date of birth, relationship status, home or office address and phone numbers. First of all, if you are uncomfortable in giving these details in an open forum where others can come and view, don't fill up these columns as most of them are optional anyway. In case you want to be selective while giving these details, you can also use the privacy settings provided by your networking site and customize your settings as per your preference .You can also choose to protect your photos and videos from general view by selecting the appropriate settings from them.

There are other facilities given by most of the online communities to make you feel safe online. In most of networking sites you can block your profile from the general profile search of the site or you can reject the friend request of the person you don’t want to talk to. You can even block a person from sending private messages to you. You can also create a private community with your friends.

Always leave your email id after lots of thoughts in an online community .These email ids in a public forum are a blessing for the spammers. They just take these email-ids and bombard your mailbox with spam mails.