Guide to online privacy

The first step is to gauge what’s out there; log out of all your social networking sites, blogs and anything else you use to post on line, and then Google your name in quotation marks.

“John Doe” – this brings up results of John and Doe – and will give you an approximation of what a stranger or potential employer would find if they Google your name.

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From misguided posts after a glass too many and photos taken during that “hilarious” Fresher’s week at university, to valuable information about you and your family; there’s a terrifyingly large amount of information that you might not want others to see.

Deleting old social media profiles is a must. This is especially important for anyone looking for work; you maybe every inch the rising young office star, but is there still that open MySpace profile of you, aged 16, beer in hand with a purple Mohican?

Log in, delete it and be done with it. If you can’t remember your password, then you can still email asking them to delete it.

Old posts are more difficult to get rid of as site administrators will rarely remove posts you’ve made, unless a court order is involved, as it can leave threads incomprehensible.

Posts and messages sent to others won’t disappear just because you have deleted your profile and the site will retain extensive records for legal reasons, though these won’t show up on Google.

So think twice before hitting Send!

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Social media is the most popular and visible part of you out there, so check the privacy settings.

Facebook privacy settings recently changed; many people have still ignored the banner at the top of their home page telling them about it meaning their profiles are far more open.

• Click on your Settings and then Privacy Settings and then go through and change every aspect of your profile so that Only Friends can see it.

Your Twitter feed is open to the public and an “in-joke” posted to a friend might just appear offensive to someone not in on it.

• Click on Settings on the top right bar on your homepage, scroll down and click on the box Protect my tweets, then hit Save.

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Cookies are tiny text files that can record information about your browsing history. Useful for remembering passwords for example, but in other cases it can be a real invasion of privacy as your browsing history can be read.

Most browsers offer cookie control, normally found under the options bar, where you can also delete your browsing history so that it won’t show up in the address bar.

This does not erase everything – law enforcement can still recover your hard drive and your ISP still tracks what you visit.

There is always the option of proxy servers, essentially a middle connection between your computer and an end system. This makes you relatively anonymous on the web.

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When buying your internet security software, check that among other things it gets rid of cookies, offers spam and phishing protection. Some even offer a “stealth browsing” mode that makes it difficult for hackers or botnets to see when you’re online.

Norton 360, McAfee Total Protection, PC Tools Internet Security and Kaspersky Internet Security all do this. Check out our reviews for our favourite products.

There are actually programs out there that can stop you writing and posting messages online when you’ve had one too many – they work by monitoring the average number of spelling mistakes you’d make when sober.  There are, tragically, no programs on the current market that can prevent you from being an idiot in charge of a modem however, so behave responsibly.