Twitter Privacy Settings

Twitter is among the most popular social networking sites that allow its users to post status updates.

These status updates can be shared with other contacts, and probably Twitter’s entire user base.

If you have a Twitter account, and you post regular status updates, those updates will be a part of Twitter’s public timeline; your updates are visible to anyone and your updates may get indexed by search engines.

There are settings that can be adjusted in Twitter to provide safety and to keep your activity private.

These privacy settings can be applied using the following steps:

Log on to your Twitter account
Click on the "Settings" option, at the upper right hand corner of your browser
Navigate to the “Accounts” Tab and click on "Protect my updates"
Make sure you save the settings by clicking on the "Save" button

This option will keep your updates private and only visible to those contacts that you have authorized. Also, your new updates will not appear on the public timeline.

Beyond this, after enabling the privacy option:

Users who want to follow you would have to request your approval
Twitter searches won’t display your protected tweets
Static page URL’s cannot be shared with users who are not following you

An Important thing to keep in mind here is that all tweets posted before the privacy settings were set may still be visible in some public places.

A word of caution: even though Twitter provides the option at protect your tweets, it is always a best practice to think and act according to your own judgment, and not post anything on Twitter that might be used against you.

Chances are, social networks may not be 100% secure; there may be leaks that are not known yet and the information you posted could fall into the wrong hands.

Learn about myspace privacy settings.