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Sharing Photos and Social Media

It is the opinion of this writer that we should not be afraid of the Internet and Electronic Data in the sense of sharing photos and communicating on Social Websites.  In many countries of the free-world (countries that are not ruled by communism and dictators), there have been recent emails and posts on Social Media Websites:

1. Warning everyone that their photos will be used against them and that is not true.
2. Warning everyone that their photos will be used to blackmail them and that is not true.
3. Warning everyone that agreeing with comments with a "like" will cause some sort of criminal conspiracy charges from the government and this is not true.

Obviously, people making threats of violence, posting hostile photos or cyber bulling is and has always been wrong.  Additionally, if a person lives in a repressive country then the three items can be legitimate concerns and warnings.

In the United States and many free society countries, many of us have always enjoyed our privacy while enjoying sharing photos with our family and friends.  The days when this was private are gone but it is not something to be worried about.  None of us would like to go back to a time without our computers, mobile phones, internet and streaming.  With the technology advances, the Gospel has had and will have a greater impact with reaching the world.

Warnings

This is a general summary of advise when conducting any type of business and even social media on the Internet.  Biblical Thoughts Website is absolutely not taking the place of a Security Advisor, but just giving some general advise:

1. All Passwords for anything including Email, Banking and any Website should be at least 15 Characters long, with mixed alpha and numeric characters.  As a partial helpful example, when using some words in your password, substitute vowels for numbers like the letter "E" for "3", depending upon your language.
2. A Financial Company is never going to call you on a phone and ask you to provide your username and password.  You may get a phone call from a Financial Security Department which will ask you to confirm your identity by security questions which will never involve you providing your username and password.
3. Never trust any website that does not have the proper "HTTPS://" as part of the full website URL.
4. When you have a concern about a phone call from a Financial Company, tell the person that you will log into the company's website and call back from a phone number provided on the website.  Always verify a URL sent to you through a Text Message or an Email.
5. It is a good idea to NOT store usernames and passwords on your phone and computer in plain text or even encrypted.  They should be hand-written down in a place that it is not easy to find and not easy to be stolen. 
   (a) There are now popular programs that will store your user id with a password, and popular Internet Browsers will also store your username and password.  They are most likely safe for generic usage, but this author advised not storing passwords for Financial Companies in a program or Internet Browsing Tool.  In the news, in the last ten years, there have been security breaches and disgruntled employees that have compromised valuable data of people who trusted companies.

Scriptures about anything we try to hide

Electronic Data being collected for Decades

1. Your phone uploads your contacts, photos, appointments and web searches to the cloud. 
2. Your phone, when GPS tracking is turned on and you are driving, informs hosts like Google your location for more reasons than getting navigation and traffic data.  It provides hosts the location you are currently at and a history is kept.
3. Your home Tablet, Computer, Entertainment TV device and Virtual Assistant sends information on you to a central data repository on what you like to search on the Internet, view on the Internet, watch on TV, record, download from the Internet, ask questions about and purchase. 
4. Your bank and credit card companies, track your expenditures to create marketing profiles along with spending habits to protect against fraud. 
5. Your emails and text messages are stored in the cloud. 
6. There are websites that can give the user an estimate or factual on how much someone else is worth, their income, credit score and even civil/criminal judicial records. 
7. There are websites that use phone text history, phone call history, phone GPS coordinate history, gasoline purchase history, credit card purchases to project the possibility of someone having or had an affair along with giving the name and address of the possible two adulterers. 
8. At your home, your Internet Service, your Satellite or Cable TV service, and even the movies you rent have you sign a waiver on your rights to allow your information to be collected by the company that you are using where it might be sold, even if they state it will not until you discover the proverbial "fine print" caveat legal paragraphs.
9. Your Electricity, Water and any utility usage is publicly available. 
10. Where you live is public information. 
11. Your phone numbers and email addresses are publicly available. 

Manufacturers, Retailers, Banking, Political Groups and Consumer Marketing Groups depend upon consumer metrics, marketing demographic information so there has been data collection on everyone for decades which is extremely valuable, is purchased and is shared on websites.  Being concerned that photos on a website or a Social Media site can somehow be used to target anyone for phishing emails, marketing mail, robo-phone calls is pointless.  Photos with names and places is really not valuable information. 

Therefore, I do not have any concerns sharing photos on Social Sites, Texting photos, Emailing Photos and click "like" on someone's photo.  My suggestion to everyone is to recognize that the future is going to be even more transparent regarding anything and everything with electronic data, so do not be concerned if someone sees a photo of you having a good time with your family and friends