🏳️⚧️ Safety tip for Transfem.Social members: 🏳️⚧️
Hi friends! Ember here with a small suggestion / reminder for online safety. This is not an instance rule, to be clear, just something that I strongly recommend for online personal safety.
In short - never share your personal information online!
We're a friendly, close-knit community here, but that doesn't make it safe to post personal details. Bad-faith actors sometimes sneak into communities like ours, looking for vulnerable people to stalk and harass. Fedi, in particular, has a problem of hateful people operating "scrapers" that use bots to scan the federated timeline and capture any information on marginalized people. This gets passed on to dangerous groups like KiwiFarms and used for targeted harassment.
Fortunately, you can resist this by limiting what types of personal information you share online. In particular, here are some things that you should never reveal:
Your legal name(s)
Your birth date
Your address (even city of residence)
Photos of your house (especially the exterior)
Your phone number
Where you work
There's also some which are a bit less critical, but I still strongly recommend against sharing. If you want to publish one of these, then please take the time to complete a calculated risk assessment!
Selfies / other photos showing your face
Your exact age (and be careful with ranges)
Where you went to school / college
Details of businesses / organizations you visit
Uncommon medical conditions (doctors get hacked a lot)
This may seem like a lot, but I promise you - it's a small price to pay for online safety! There are horrible people out there, and they'd like nothing more than to make us suffer. Let's make sure that doesn't happen!
--
With love from Ember,
Transfem.Social Community Moderator
:heart_pride: :heart_trans:
"Micromanagement is fundamentally incompatible with psychological safety. And without psychological safety, teams don’t innovate, learn from their mistakes, or grow in ability."