Guidelines for Publishing Information Online

October is National Cyber Security Month. Make cyber security a priority; learn more at staysafeonline.org

The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) has a great article by on their website featuring general guidelines for publishing information on the internet.

Guidelines include:

• View the internet as a novel, not a diary – Make sure you are comfortable with anyone seeing the information you put online. Expect that people you have never met will find your page; even if you are keeping an online journal or blog, write it with the expectation that it is available for public consumption.
• Be careful what you advertise – In the past, it was difficult to find information about people other than their phone numbers or address. Now, an increasing amount of personal information is available online, especially because people are creating personal web pages with information about themselves. When deciding how much information to reveal, realize that you are broadcasting it to the world.
• Realize that you can’t take it back – Once you publish something online, it is available to other people and to search engines. You can change or remove information after something has been published, but it is possible that someone has already seen the original version. Even if you try to remove the page(s) from the internet, someone may have saved a copy of the page or used excerpts in another source. Some search engines “cache” copies of web pages so that they open faster; these cached copies may be available after a web page has been deleted or altered.

Read the complete guidelines produced by US-CERT on their website.