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When was the last time you cleaned out your social media profiles? It’s something you should consider doing if you’ve been on a network for a few years, and probably should make a reminder to do on at least an annual basis. Spring cleaning your social media profiles can take care of various issues and maybe most importantly, can decrease your privacy and security risks.
Clean ALL the Social Media Things
Here are a few things you should consider checking, updating and cleaning out on a regular basis:
- Friends & Followers – helps to streamline your newsfeeds to show what you want to see
- Twitter Lists – helps to find the content you’re most interested in on Twitter
- Account settings – networks add new settings for privacy and sharing all the time and often default the new setting to open or wide sharing. Go through all your privacy settings to ensure they’re set where you want.
- Facebook Friends should be set to private or friends only to prevent cloning. Watch a tutorial on Facebook.
- Turn off Public Followers if you don’t want total strangers following you in their newsfeed
- Disconnect from people in Facebook Messenger if they’re not people you need to keep in touch with anymore
- Clean out app-based access/permissions
How to Clean Out Facebook App Permissions
How to Clean Out LinkedIn App Permissions
How to Clean Out Twitter App Permissions
How to Clean out Instagram App Permissions
Further Steps to Improve Social Media Security
- Consider whether enabling two-factor authentication is a route you wish to take. This will force the network to ask you for a code, sent by email or text message, each and every time you log into the network. It’s annoying to some, but if you get the code message and didn’t ask for it, you’ll know someone has tried to hack into your account.
- Change your passwords on a regular basis.
- Use secure passwords that include a mixture of capitals and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols. Try replacing letters in a word with similar-looking symbols, i.e. Pa$$wo4d instead of Password.
- Don’t click on links in private messages unless you’re expecting that friend to send you a link. They could be unknowingly passing along spam.
- Don’t fill out every quiz and test you see. Those things are gathering info and have access to your account. I do them sometimes, but it really scares me to see how many some people do.
What are your favourite social media security tips?
