Category Archives: privacy

People in Your Social Circle: Dr. Kathleen Young Chats with me About Social Networking Challenges for Clinicians

Last February, the Google Buzz fiasco affected lots of people who did not want their email relationships exposed to the world. At the time, Dr. Kathleen Young and I shot a bunch of emails back and forth sharing our concerns over the situation. Dr. Young, who also maintains a professional Twitter account pointed out to [...]

Email Tips for Clinicians

This article is part of an online course: Digital and Social Media Ethics for Psychotherapists for 8 CE credits Email Tips for Clinicians Nearly everyone uses email nowadays. I would guess anyone who is reading this right now has an email account. While many clinicians avoid social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn [...]

Facebook Does it Again: More Privacy Changes Without Adequate Notification to Users

Facebook released news of some big privacy changes this week. As always, changes that affect our privacy settings are important to  fully understand. The biggest changes allow third-party websites to access and store information about individual users. You can find out more information here along with some instructions on how to restrict information. Just to [...]

Location Based Check-In Sites for Mental Health Professionals

This article is part of an online course: Digital and Social Media Ethics for Psychotherapists for 8 CE credits At a couple of recent trainings, and in consultations with other mental health professionals, the question has come up about whether is is okay to check in on sites like Foursquare, Loopt, brightkite, and Gowalla when [...]

Google Buzz Alarms a Psychotherapist

Wake up and smell the smoke Last Wednesday, I logged into Gmail to discover that I had a new little Buzz icon. When I clicked on it, I discovered what everyone was tweeting about: I was auto-following a number of people. Some I knew and some I didn’t really know at all. We just happened [...]