Social Media
Online communities have existed since the invention of the internet, and give people around the world the opportunity to connect, communicate and share. Although these networks are a great way to promote social interaction and bring people together, they are also loved by cyber criminals, because they allow them to connect with millions of potential victims, and the data available on social media can make targetting individuals easy. Secure your account, lock down your privacy settings, but know that even after doing so, all data intentionally and non-intentionally uploaded is effectively public.
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| Done? | Advice | Level | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
essential | Social media profiles get stolen or taken over all too often. To protect your account: use a unique and strong password, and enable 2-factor authentication. | ||
essential | Most social networks allow you to control your privacy settings. Ensure that you are comfortable with what data you are currently exposing and to whom. | ||
essential | Even if we set our privacy settings to the most private, we can't guarantee our private content doesn't become available. Someone with access to our content could screenshot and share it, or our account could be hacked. And once something is online, it can be impossible to get it removed if someone has made a copy of it. Therefore, before uploading, posting or commenting on anything, think "Would I mind if this was totally public for the rest of my life?" | ||
essential | When you create your profile on some social media platforms, you are encouraged to give as much detail about yourself as possible. But this information is valuable for cyber criminals, as it can help them create phishing scams targetted at you. Avoid uploading things like your date of birth, your hometown, and where you went to school. | ||
essential | Status updates, comments, check-ins, images and videos can unintentionally reveal a lot more than you intended them to. This is especially relevant to photos and videos, which may show things in the background. | ||
essential | Never post your real email address or mobile number. Cyber criminals want these to help target scams towards you. | ||
essential | When you download a social media platform's app, the app usually wants permission to do lots of things on your device. It might want access to your files, your contact list, and your location. Think about what you want your social media to do, and if it doesn't need the access. don't grant it permission to access it. It is not likely that your social media needs access to your call log, for example. | ||
essential | If you plan to share any content that reveals where you are, then wait until you have left that place. This is particularly important when you are taking a trip, at a restaurant, campus, hotel/resort, public building or airport. |