When using Facebook as a law enforcement officer, there are some specific guidelines that you must always follow in order to protect your privacy:
- Don’t document law enforcement activity on your personal profile – law enforcement may big a big part of your life, but that doesn’t mean that you want to put yourself out there to the world. With Facebook’s current settings, friends of friends may catch some of your posts, and you don’t want these individuals to make the connection that you’re a law enforcement officer to your other off time activities.
- Don’t include personal details on your law enforcement pages – if you’ve got a Facebook page for your law enforcement activities, you need to keep your personal life out of it entirely. Don’t post pictures of your kids, even if they are attending a public event, and never mention them by name.
- Think about who you connect to – every Facebook ‘like’ you make goes on record forever. Recognize that people may judge you based on the connections you make online, and this could work against you when you’re interacting with the general public, or the courtrooms.
- Don’t post anything online that you wouldn’t want people you interact with to see – remember that the things you post online could potentially be visible to people you arrest, victims you interact with and more.