Twitter is an up-and-coming social networking utility that lets you update your status, telling your contacts and possibly the entire world what you are doing. Posting Twitter updates publicly means:
- Your updates appear in Twitter’s public timeline — a flowing river of every member’s status.
- Anyone can see your Twitter updates.
- Your Twitter updates can be indexed by search engines.
How to set your Twitter account to private
In order to keep your Twitter activity private, follow these steps:
- Log into Twitter.
- Click “Settings” in the upper right corner of the screen.
- Under the “Account” tab check off “Protect my updates”.
- Click the “Save” button.
By protecting your updates, you remove them from the public timeline and hide them from anyone who you do not approve.
If you spend any amount of time Twittering before protecting your updates, the statuses you posted before changing your privacy settings may still be publicly visible in some places.
Caution
Even though Twitter provides the means to protect your updates, you should still use your own judgment as to what is and is not appropriate to post. Anything that you don’t want discovered should be kept to yourself. There is no guarantee that Twitter, or any other social networking site for that matter, won’t have a security or data breach in the future. Heck, you can’t even be 100% sure as to whether one of your followers might pass along your private updates to an unauthorized third party.
