Recently, the Macedonian Directorate for Personal Data Protection has been receiving an increasing number of notifications about online personal data abuse, particularly in relation with the social networking portals. The creation of fake profiles on the social networking websites is not in accordance with the provisions of the Macedonian Law on personal data protection and the basic principles for personal data protection.

The Directorate is regularly cooperating with the web administrators of these portals for fast, effective discovery and resolution of problems related to personal data breach. However, it is crucial for the ones who are using this kind of websites to be careful when they are publishing their own, as well as someone else’s data on the internet.

Recommendations from the Directorate to the providers:

• Providing transparency and open information to the users, i.e. providing a privacy policy.
• Enabling the creation and use of profiles with user names (aliases).
• Keeping promises made to the users.
• Easily available settings for managing the website’s privacy policy.
• Improving the control over users’ data usage.

• Be careful! Think twice before publishing your personal data (especially your name and surname, address and phone number) on the social networking websites.
• Think twice before using your real name instead of an alias.
• Respect the privacy of others. Be particularly careful when publishing another person’s personal data or information (as well as photographs or links to photographs) without that person’s prior consent.
• Get informed! Who is managing the service that you are using? What country is the service located in? Is there a personal data protection authority in this country which you can address in case your personal data have been abused? Were you offered any options for protection of your personal data?
• Use all of the available settings for managing the website’s privacy policy. The limited access to your profile should be an option, especially when it comes to search engine indexing.
• Use different identification data on the internet. It is recommended to use different user names and passwords on different websites.
• Be cautious about how your children are using the internet, especially when it comes to social networking websites.