For privacy-minded people, securing social media accounts present a tricky trade-off between maintaining online relationships with friends and family, customers and colleagues, while controlling what personal information is available to the wider world.
Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other social media continue to be some of the most-frequent targets of major data-piracy. And yet using these tools is increasingly a business and social requirement. Managing these accounts can be complicated, and many are abandoned rather than deactivated, heightening the potential for misuse.
Below we list a few best-practices for people who are both active on social media, as well as those looking to limit and clean up the data trail of years of online-activity.
The bare minimum should be 10-12-character strings using a mix of letters, numbers, and symbols. One popular mnemonic device is to use a memorable sentence as the underlying basis for the string.
Example: “Four score and seven years ago…” = 4score&7ya
This should be a standard practice with any online accounts, but is most important for things like social media, banking, and any work-related areas. Here’s a helpful list of ways to enable this feature across a range of social media sites.
The most common form of two-factor authentication is for an account to send a text message to your phone with a 5-6 digit confirmation code. This is considered acceptable for most general-use sites, but for things like online-banking, or anything enabling online-payments, you should be using additional security measures due to the lower-security threshold for text-messages.
Facebook, Twitter, and a few other sites are capable of broadcasting your current location even when you’re not actively using the platforms. It often requires changing settings on both the desktop app as well as your personal devices. Instructions on how to disable Facebook location-tracking is located here; and the same for Twitter is here.
Longtime users of platforms like Facebook may have spent years approving 3rd party access to your profile and account, only for those 3rd parties to have gone out of business or changed ownership. It is highly recommended to periodically check both Google and Facebook account app-permissions, and delete all/any you no longer actively using.
To clear legacy permissions from your Google account:
To clear legacy permissions from your Facebook account:
One common method of identity theft is for identity-thieves to hijack unused email accounts that may still have associated authorizations. You can quickly check if past addresses are defunct by checking them here. If it comes back “Invalid”, then the account is deleted.
Below are instructions for manually deleting legacy AOL, Hotmail, or Yahoo accounts:
AOL & Yahoo
With both sites now owned by Verizon Media, they share similar basic account deletion procedure
Hotmail
Google/Gmail
For people with little interest in maintaining public profiles, its best to simply restrict social media use exclusively to your circle of friends and associates. Here are instructions for making both Facebook and Twitter accounts private.
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