It’s too easy to give too much information away about yourself on social media. If a crook gets a hold of your password, he can prey on your friends under the guise of your good name. Just by posting a picture, you can easily give away your location and the time you were there. The point of social media is to share with friends and family, but it’s easy to fall into the trap of oversharing, even if you don’t mean to. Here are three safeguards you can put in place to prevent that from happening.
1. Turn off your device’s location/GPS settings.
Many apps broadcast your location even if you don’t mean to. How many times have you posted only to find out later that the town you were in was in the footnotes of your post? Snap Maps even broadcasts your real-time location to other users, and calculates how fast you are going to match you with the appropriate transportation for your Bitmoji. You can prevent this by only turning on your device’s GPS when you need directions.
2. Make yourself un-taggable.
Under the Privacy Settings in most social media platforms, you can set it so only you can tag yourself in photos or posts. This comes in handy when you have that friend who always “Checks In” to whatever location you’re at and tags the friends they’re with. Friends can innocently tag you in posts and photos that give away activities, associations, and locations that you want kept private. Instead of finding a picture of yourself in your newsfeed, you can be notified when a tag of you has been request it and then decline or accept.
3. Use strong passwords and two-factor authentication.
As for all of your accounts, use strong and unique passwords. Most apps give you the option for two-factor authentication. Take advantage of this extra layer of security. Using a password manager like LastPass can be helpful for generating and remember passwords, and also because this app is designed to only enter passwords into the appropriate URL. That means if you are lured onto a fake website designed to phish you, your password manager simply won’t enter you login credentials because it won’t recognize the URL.
Aside from these three preventative tips is always the golden rule of the internet: think twice before you post, be careful what you “like,” and keep those settings private.
