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As the explosion of social media, not only for social networking but also as a business tool, continues unabated around the world, users have to learn to be more careful about their online presence, an information technology expert has warned.

In an interview with the Jakarta Globe on Tuesday, British-based IT expert James Lyne said what started out as a consumer fad had become an invaluable tool for business and had sparked a new trend called “consumerization.”

“It is a general theory that if a consumer decides to buy technology like an iPod, or chooses to use a certain online service such as Gmail, it becomes popular and trendy in the consumer world and then gets carried into the IT environment and [influences] the way companies do their business,” said Lyne, who is the chief technologist at Sophos, an IT security firm.

As an example, he said a large number of his clients now reached him through social media, preferring to connect with him online instead of asking for his business card.

“This is just one prime example,” he said, adding that instant messaging was another service that had initially been used between friends but was now an integral enterprise tool for companies reaching out to their clients on a variety of media.

Contrary to widely-held perceptions, Lyne said social media did not always reduce workplace productivity.

“Sure there are many people who use Facebook for non-work related purposes, and in many companies they see this as getting in the way of productivity so they may wish to block it, and that’s entirely acceptable,” he said.

Lyne added, however, that some employers found it was worth a small loss in productivity to allow their employees flexibility during office hours, which made them more likely to work after hours when needed.

“Social media can really improve productivity, although there are risks to manage. I see huge benefit with the exchange of information that happens in social media,” Lyne said.

He said companies’ biggest concern should be to make sure employees are taking the necessary security precautions on social media. He said the biggest risk of using social media was being exposed to identity theft and the misuse of personal information that people put on their social media accounts and profiles.

Lyne said it was important and worth the effort to set up proper security safeguards to protect one’s identity, even for information that might seem trivial.

“Be careful about disclosing personal details, such as pets, names of schools or first girlfriend or boyfriend,” he said. “Be very careful about the information you put on your profile, and particularly think about date of birth and those kinds of details.”

Lyne said users were often unaware of the risks of giving away their personal details, which could be used later to obtain credit or conduct fraudulent transactions. “The best advice is to lie,” he said.

Another online faux pas many people make, Lyne said, is uploading personal pictures, particularly embarrassing or silly ones.

“In the future, it might jeopardize your chance of being employed, since companies now try to get to know a candidate through their Facebook account as it tells them more about the candidate then what they can find out from an interview,” he said.

“This a real privacy problem and basically means once you put something out there in the cloud, you should assume that it’s everywhere — you can’t get rid of it.”

Lyne said Facebook was only an example, and the same principle applied to other social media such as Flicker and Twitter. Facebook, however, he said, was the one in which people revealed the most about themselves.

“There are controls on Facebook that users can use to restrict photos to a specific group of family or friends — there are more controls available than people can think of. Though they’re not perfect, I’d advise people to use them,” Lyne said, adding that this would help to differentiate business associates from friends.

“In the real world you wouldn’t want to share the information with [business associates], so why would you do that in Facebook?”