When the term ‘Global Village’ is talked about, social media is one of the innovations that many people envision. Undeniably, social media sites have provided a platform where people share all the information that they deem ‘shareable.’
We cannot forget to mention that different social media platforms are today used by businesses for marketing. Also, individuals turn to them when they need to stay updated with the latest information, learn, share musings, and consumes other forms of digital content.
With the ability to share virtually anything on social networks, it is difficult to determine what happens what goes on begin our postings and DMs. Research firms have stressed the need to protect privacy on popular social media websites because most of them only guarantee end-to-end encryption only for direct messages, which makes it easy for cybercriminals to user their social engineering techniques to quickly get all the personal information they need to fulfill their desires.
Therefore, it is good to keep your private information safe. Though the old saying that says sharing is caring is still valid, you might end up doing yourself more harm than good if your overshare information on social media websites.
Here are some tips that will help you improve data sharing and security on different social media platforms;
Invest in physical access points to protect your data
If you’re the devices you use are stolen, your personal or sensitive business data might be at risk. To prevent this, invest in a security system for your office, such as the best MYSQL backup. With it, you will recover the lost social media information, and take stringed action to ensure it is protected.
Use strong password
This is the fundamental step towards enhancing your security on social media. Using passwords that are easy to guess such as ‘myname123’ is a potential hazard. Instead, create a strong password that features a blend of uppercase and lowercase letters, symbols, numbers, and special characters. If you have a problem remembering passwords (it’s a weakness in many people), you can store it in a protected folder, and delete once you have mastered it.
That’s not all. After three or so months, change the password. If you have had the same password since the invention of Facebook, be sure hundreds of people have access to your data.
Where possible, enable the two-factor authentication feature, which will make it difficult for a to-be hacker to get his way into your site and manipulate your data.
Create custom settings
The biggest mistake that most social media users do is to rely on the default settings of social media platforms. The truth is that most of these settings contain weak security measures, and they can compromise data sharing and the security of your social media website.
Apart from the necessary things that the default settings will allow you to keep private such as personal conversations, birthday, place of work, phone number, and home address, manually create custom settings that can help you control some aspects of data sharing such as tagged posts and photos. Remember, setting the privacy policy of social media sites to the highest level makes it nearly impossible for attackers to target them.
Improve your user habits
Before you post a location or share any information on popular social media sites, first ask yourself whether you need to share it, or you need to keep it private. Also, the videos you share from unconfirmed sources might be the reason why your sites are always a clear target for hackers. Avoid them at all costs.
Close accounts that aren’t in use
There is no need of exposing your business or personal data in social media accounts that you no longer use. Close them up, to ensure you do not disclose sensitive information. If you don’t, hackers might use this information for malicious activities such as sending spam and creating malware, and this might be detrimental to you or your business.
As hackers escalate their tactics to ensure they get as much personal data as they can, employing the tips mentioned above will help you improve your data sharing and security on the most popular social media websites.
