Social media is not only a place where you can share your thoughts and experiences with others. It is also one of those places where you can easily get targeted by unscrupulous people. Hanging out on any public online location can be dangerous since it is visited by all kinds of people from different backgrounds.
You will need to be careful of identity thieves as they are always looking for opportunities to find a victim to hit on social media. The following are 8 safety measures you can practice when you are using social media.
- Use a Strong Password
The social media platform is a popular place for hackers to login into other people’s account to steal sensitive information. Therefore, it is important to always use a strong password for your account. You can include a variety of characters such as lowercase and uppercase letter, number, and symbol to make it harder for people to guess. Besides, you should take the initiative to change the password every 3 months.
- Disable Automatic Login
You can disable automatic login if you are afraid of someone getting your device and logging in to view your account information. The social media account can also be hacked through your email account, cloud storage account or other accounts that are linked to from your profile. Therefore, you should also never allow automatic login for these linked accounts. When the browser often asks you to remember this as saved login, don’t click the save button. You can easily delete saved login by going to the Privacy in the browser preferences settings.
- Delete Old Social Media Account
Old social media accounts that are not in use should be deleted as they are frequently targeted by hackers. Not only should you disable the old account but you should close it down so that there is no way of accessing it anymore. On a low maintained account, you often get a lot of spammers that try to contact you and add you as their friends. Some of these spammers are dangerous with a malicious intention to make you a victim of their cunning scheme. By deleting your account, you will never receive an email from the social media account anymore when they request to add you as a friend.
- Turn Off Geotagging
There are a lot of social media sites that use geotagging to track its users. Geotagging is no good because it lets people know where you are, for example, it knows your house address or the address of the restaurant where you are in. It can also track who you are with if you tag them. Twitter and Instagram are the two sites that use geotagging. You can usually turn off geotagging by going to the security settings in your account profile.
- Don’t Simply Respond to A Stranger
On social media, you must be careful in responding to any message in your inbox or chat messenger. Anyone can just create a profile and pretend to be someone else on social media. Many people like to use fake photo and a fake name to create their profiles so you must be careful. Don’t take the risk to respond to the message if the contact looks suspicious. The safest practice is to only let the real friends whom you know personally to contact you and view your private photos on social media.
- Keeping Private Content to Yourself and Your Family
The social media is a public place which means anyone can access the content you post unless you set them private. If people could access your photos, it means they also have a chance to use them for their own selfish means. For example, they could Photoshop your photos and post in another place online. Look for a menu button near the photo where you can click and set the photo to private so that public visitors who are not in your contacts will not be able to view them.
- Disable Ads on the Social Media
You may be asking why social media always show ads that you are interested in. It is because these ads have cookies and they can track your web surfing behaviour to display the most relevant ads. Some of these ads may install malware on your computer to steal your sensitive information. If you get hit by the hacker, you may see an error page when attempting to log in or a form that asks you to fill in your personal information. To avoid all these hassles, you can use an ad blocker tool like AdGuard to block them. It can strip off all the ads without interfering with the website design. Get more details at https://adguard.com/en/article/block-pop-ups.html.
