Security

The importance of privacy and safety on social media

Co-op

On Monday, the Social team held an event for 100 young people who attend Co-op Academies in Greater Manchester. The students were 14 to 16 years old and they’ll soon be leaving school and thinking about what’s next. The aim of the talk was to raise awareness about:

  • social media privacy
  • online safety
  • social media and your career
  • presenting yourself online

Here’s what happened.

Privacy and safety

The focus of my talk was on privacy and safety on social media networks. I warned that if we’re not careful, the range of data we disclose across various social platforms could easily be pieced together and someone with malicious intent they could steal your identity.

The takeaway points were:

  1. Make sure you know who can see your social media interactions. Some networks, like Twitter, are ‘open’ and they’re designed for networking and engaging with people you don’t necessarily know. Facebook and Snapchat are ‘closed’ and reserved for engaging with people you know personally.
  2. Create strong passwords for all your accounts and set up 2-factor authentication on your recovery email accounts. MUO gives decent guidance on this.
  3. Don’t share photos with anyone you don’t trust. Although Snapchat photos appear to ‘disappear’ they can be screen-grabbed and saved. They also exist for a time in Snapchat’s servers and they can be retrieved by the police.

Ian in front of young people with microphone presenting.

Social media and your career

Matt Eyre helps recruit people into Co-op Digital. He shared his tips on how to use social media to find your first, or your next, job. His advice is to:

  1. Have different accounts for personal and professional purposes.
  2. Check your privacy settings on all accounts.
  3. Keep your professional profiles up-to-date.
  4. Be proactive if you’re interested in working at a particular place. Get in touch with them.

Photograph of Matt Eyre reading from prompt sheet in front of students.

How you present yourself online

Choosing how we present ourselves by controlling what we share is really important. It’s about creating an image of ourselves to people we might not have met which can be useful when we’re looking for new jobs. Catherine Storey is our Social media content planning manager at Co-op Digital. She landed her last few jobs, including this one, through her careful management of personal social media accounts.

Here are her tips:

  1. Check who can see which parts of your profile on every social media account you have. It’s ok to show you have a social life, but make sure you know who can see it and the impression you might leave them with.
  2. Your Twitter handle is searchable and it says a lot about you. It’s an online representation of you, your ‘digital name’ if you like. Where possible, your digital name should be the same across each social network which helps build your online identity.
  3. Choose what you engage with carefully. When you tweet; update your status; post a photo; send a video, you expect people to see these things and it’s easy to be mindful of your output. However, when you ‘like’ a tweet, a photo or a status or leave a comment, your engagement is more passive and it’s easier to overlook the fact that these things can reflect on you too.

Photograph of Cat Storey presenting in from of students.

Aaron’s story

To finish, Aaron Omotosho talked about his (paid) work experience at Co-op Digital. Aaron spoke about the time he spent with product and service teams within Co-op Digital and his time after this completing a coding course at Northcoders. We also heard from Jonny Rathbone from Northcoders who spoke encouragingly about the opportunities out there for young people in the digital sector.

photograph of Aaron presenting in front of students.

We hope to hold more events like this in the future. It’s all part of our work to encourage a thriving tech sector in the north-west.

Ian Ferguson
Community manager

Introducing the Digital Operations team

Michaela Kurkiewicz

On the Co-op Digital blog we’ve spoken a lot about the products and services we’re working on like Membership, our new coop.co.uk site and location finder. We’ve spoken less about the Digital Operations team and the work it does before those products and services can be made available to the world.

Time for an intro?

We recently did a show and tell over in Federation but for those who couldn’t make it, here’s what we spoke about.

Photo shows a group of colleagues watching the Digital Operations team show and tells.

The Digital Operations team’s responsibilities

The Digital Operations team looks after 3 things:

  1. Service management.
  2. Platform infrastructure.
  3. IT security.

The role we play differs for each area of work. For example, for Membership our role is to run the live service and its infrastructure, whereas for location finder we’re supporting the team while they run things themselves. Sometimes, our role is more about helping teams who are designing new services to think about how they’ll be operated and made secure during their life cycle, right from the early idea through to being live.

How we support teams

Photo shows 4 members of the Digital Operations team at their show and tell.

The Digital Operations team doesn’t take on development, support or responsibility for running new services. These things fall under a product or service team’s remit and we advise them. When teams need platform or operations engineers to build and run something, we help them find the people and resources they need.

We help Digital and Group work together

Co-op Digital is only one part of the Co-op, so it’s important that the work we do is in line with the wider policies. We help digital and non-digital people work together by translating Group policies into something accessible for digital teams to work from, and by helping Group colleagues understand how agile ways of working can support the policies.

Saving teams time by creating patterns

A really important part of our role is to build a set of patterns and ways of working that will help teams build things that are secure, reliable and scalable and perform well. We’re still in the early stages but the plan is that using the patterns will help teams make sure their product or service has security controls, disaster recovery, monitoring, alerting, a way for users to tell us about issues, and a support route to get those bugs to the developers.

The patterns are being built around Co-op policies such as our security and data protection policy, which means that if a team uses one to build they will have ticked most of the security policy checkboxes.

Ready for public consumption?

We’re also the keepers of the ‘readiness checklists’ – a list of things that need to be in place before teams make something new publicly available. Points on the checklist includes whether an alpha is publicly accessible; whether it captures colleague, member or customer data and if it integrates with any internal Co-op systems. The checklists aren’t a hoop to jump through just before a service goes live – teams need to start thinking about being production-ready right from alpha phase.

Working on something new? Tell us all about it!

Our big message to teams at our show and tell was: if you’re working on something new, involve us as early as possible. This way we can share any patterns and technology that might help you work more efficiently. There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel each time we build something new. If we’ve got something that works – your team can just reuse it.

Coming to us early usually means we can pick up any problems and point out anything on our checklist that your product or service might not meet much earlier. That’ll mean we won’t have to delay anything.

Another place we can help is if you’re thinking of subscribing to an online service or purchasing a product. Maybe you are thinking of starting a new blog, creating a wiki, using a productivity tool or anything else that will help you with your job – you should make sure you speak to us to find out if it needs review or if there is a suitable product already available.

Come and say hi

We have a regular ‘surgery’ on the sixth floor in Federation House at 11am on Tuesdays. We also have a Slack channel or drop us an email on digitaloperations@coopdigital.co.uk

Michaela Kurkiewicz
Principal service manager