If the web wasn’t an ever-evolving creature, it’d be easy to sign yourself up on the big social networking sites, pick your settings and be 100 percent sure that your data is as private as you desire.

Unfortunately, that’s far from the case. Every website keeps tweaking and changing its settings, and all too often that means you’re losing your privacy, whether you like it or not.

Case in point: The CEO for Spotify, a popular music service, recently came out and apologized for changing everyone’s privacy settings without warning. If some weren’t keeping an eye out for exactly this sort of transgression, the millions of Spotify users might never have realized the company had changed its privacy protections.

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There are three possible responses to this intrusive problem: Ignore it, go offline completely, or allocate the time to tweak your settings and make sure things are always locked down the way you want. If you want to stay online, you’re only real option is No. 3, but you’ll have to be vigilant if you want to be sure you’re protected.

Let’s look at two services to see how this manifests.

Facebook
With more than 900 million daily active users, Facebook is the busiest site on the planet. Odds are very good you have an account, too. But in an attempt to simplify privacy settings, the company has continually redesigned the account privacy configuration area, even adding a separate Privacy Checkup hosted by a cute little blue dinosaur.

fig01Even with the Privacy Checkup, however, privacy settings are spread across Facebook, and some of them show up on a per-post basis. Post a photo of your child for “friends only,” and the next post you make will have the same default privacy setting. That means the opposite is true, too. In the midst of posting photos of your bachelor party shenanigans you push something out to “public” for work, what’s the default setting for that next photo you post? Yeah, that’s a danger.

Twitter
Things have improved with privacy in the world of Twitter during the past few years. It used to be that private, one-to-one messages were only differentiated from public broadcast messages by the inclusion of the prefix “DM” on the message. As you can imagine, that was a disaster. It was so common for private messages to leak out into the public that there were Twitter accounts dedicated to sharing the most embarrassing (or explicit!) with the world. Anthony Weiner, anyone?

This advancement has brought its own problems, however, one of which is related to geotagging. To work on the cellular network, your fancy smartphone must know its exact location at all times. This means that every photo you take also has that location data embedded. By default, Twitter not only retains this information, it makes it publicly accessible. So you post a photo taken in your kitchen, and the entire world knows exactly where you live.

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Geotagging is a “feature” you can disable in Twitter’s security and privacy settings. It’s here, too, that Twitter can include the geolocation information on every post you make, even without a photo. Just take your time. There are a lot of settings for a service that seems to be so basic and straightforward.

fig02There’s a tension between sharing, oversharing, privacy and modern technology that’s worth noting here, too. The more advanced our tech, the less privacy we seem to be able to retain.

As Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy declared, “Privacy is dead. Get over it.” He offered that opinion more than a decade ago and his prediction seems to be coming true. We now routinely see celebrities, politicians and corporate executives post updates that weren’t meant for the public eye. They quickly delete them, but the updates come out anyway because someone else managed to get a screen capture.

“Privacy is dead. Get over it.”

Abolitionist Wendell Phillips famously said “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” In the first part of the 21st century, I think it can be appropriately adapted to “eternal vigilance is the price of being online” if you want to retain even a modicum of control over your privacy.

Now, go and check the privacy settings on social networks you use daily or weekly.

And set a reminder to do it again every three to four months.

Forever.