How to Protect Your Identity and Your Privacy on Social Media

Social media is excellent for news (with some critical thinking), work, and entertainment. With its emphasis on sharing, however, it’s not always so good for maintaining privacy.

Maintaining privacy online is important because there are many fraudsters and opportunists out there who can use people’s details to commit scams or identity theft.

Phishing, the attempt to gain more personal details with which to commit fraud, has doubled since early 2020, with around 15 billion spam emails sent everyday. A successful phishing attempt allows a criminal to commit identity theft to sign up for goods and services or make unauthorized transactions.

Such criminals frequently commit scams via email and social media. Social media users are frequent targets, partly because of the culture of sharing – people share personal information and have access to many other contacts who are only a click or two away.

Potential employers frequently look up social media pages of their candidates to learn more about them. Criminals do the same. So, good internet hygiene helps protect your identity and privacy on social media, which helps keep you and your network safe.

Check out the following tips to enjoy safer, more private use of social media.

Don’t Share Personally Identifiable Information (PII)

Personally identifiable information is the kind of information that can let someone identify you online, including but not limited to:

• your full name
• your phone number
• your date of birth
• your credit card details
• your social security number

When creating a social media profile, the platform normally asks for personal details. These may include age, gender, location, and profession. They typically ask for details of interests in order to match products and services.

If there is an option to mask your age from other users, however, doing so will help you maintain online privacy. Your date of birth is a legal requirement for the social media site so they know you are old enough to use it, but it’s also the kind of information that can be used to identify you and, for a fraudster, to target you for a scam. So it can be a good idea to hide this detail from other users.

Sharing your state or even the city can help you connect with others online, but avoid posting your precise street address. Again, this can make you vulnerable to fraud or unsolicited marketing.

Sometimes, when you connect with someone online, it can be desirable to share more information about yourself to deepen the connection. However, you must be aware that sharing PII with your contacts will increase the risk to your online privacy.

It’s easy to create a fake profile on a social media site. Some scammers maintain false personas and cultivate relationships for months or years to earn the trust of their contacts. This is often the case for sexual predators who aim to coerce minors into performing sexual activities or sharing sexual images online.

Before sending anyone personal information, including your full name or phone number, it’s worth verifying their identity on Nuwber. Nuwber is people search site with data on US citizens so that you can use it to help you work out if someone is really who they say they are, thus making your online relationships safer and more authentic.

Use A Strong Password

Many of us (too many) have had the experience of someone communicating with our contacts as though they are us. The messages might be invitations to bogus investments or advertisements for dubious products. They may also be phishing attempts, aiming to get as many of our contacts as possible to divulge personal information because they think they have been contacted by a friend, not a fraudster.

One way that criminals achieve this is by discovering your password for a social media platform. They may have been able to do this because a password was easy to guess (for example, password1 or 123456), the user may have failed to log out, or the device may have been left unattended. Other methods exist, but these are the most common.

Once a criminal has access to your social media account, they can more effectively target your friends, family, and professional network. You can help keep them out, however, by maintaining a strong password.

A strong password is a combination of letters, numbers, and symbols. Combine capital letters and lowercase letters, too, to add complexity. And note that a longer password tends to be harder to crack than a shorter one.

Avoid names or words that appear in a dictionary as hackers may either guess these or use software to help crack a password that contains recognizable words. With this in mind, also avoid things like the names of sports teams and significant dates of birth. While they are easy to remember, they can also be easy to crack.

Change Your Password Regularly

You may not know if someone has one of your social media passwords. The fraudster may be very subtle. They don’t always use a scattergun approach to crime.

To maintain the integrity of your social media account and protect your privacy – and that of your contacts – it’s an excellent idea to change your passwords regularly.

Creating and updating passwords regularly for each of your social media accounts can be time-consuming and difficult to track. Fortunately, password managers can create and update your passwords, keeping them in a secure location. They can even take care of logging you into your social media platforms, making your life easier as well as improving your online privacy.

Log Out

Logging out of social media when you’ve finished your session is an excellent way to maintain your online privacy. It prevents unauthorized users from using your device to investigate your private details and communications.

Sometimes, unauthorized access occurs because someone stumbled across a social media account that was not logged out. It’s not always a dedicated hacker but sometimes an opportunist who happens to be (from their point of view) in the right place at the right time.

Staying logged in is convenient because it means you don’t need to retype your username or remember your password, which, if you’re using a strong one, can be tricky to type. However, remaining logged in also increases your risk of unauthorized access and can damage your online privacy.

Maintaining online privacy and good security habits is particularly important while using social media. Through our social media accounts, we are connected to dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of contacts. Our activities affect their online privacy. So this is a responsibility that we all share.

Fortunately, improving online privacy while using social media is easy by following the tips in this post. If this has been useful, please share it so that your friends, family, and colleagues can work together to keep social media private enough to remain safe, useful, and enjoyable.