Are you a Social Media user? Follow These Precautions.
To some extent, society is beginning to recognize the serious risks posed by social media harassment and intimidation. Now, cross-platform abuse isn’t easy to tackle on your own. Especially if you’ve never dealt with anything like it before. As the old adage goes, prevention is always preferable than treatment. So here are a few safety measures you may take when using social media.
Before you hit the “Post” button, stop and think.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with making your social media profiles private. And turning on all the bells and whistles under the “privacy” tab. But remember that even if you don’t publish your own content. It might be shared by others who may not have your best interests at heart.
Anything’s more, what you share today (even in jest) might come back to haunt you later. Background checks conducted by universities and potential employers sometimes include a search of one’s online social media profiles. Consider if the impression someone could have of you from reading that tweet is fair. It’s easy to lose perspective during an intense debate on the internet; think again before you publish.
Get Your Social Media Doxx-Proof
Doxxing is another issue that has to be thought about. In other words, someone discovers your true identity and either publishing it online or threatening to do so as a sort of blackmail. Even seemingly harmless information, such as noting that you attended a specific school or naming a classmate, might lead to doxxing.
Take a look at your social media accounts and delete anything that might help a cyberstalker learn personal information about you. To get more social media precautions, you could check https://www.naturalselectionthefilm.com/ for better results. Delete your high school or college activity on Facebook with the aid of the built-in activity log or use a free application like TweetDelete.
Do a Google search for your name and any online handles you used to determine if any results contain identifying information. You never know what type of spammy websites may show up, even if you’ve told Google not to crawl your social network account. If you fill out this form, Google will filter out the information you don’t want to see.
Use a Virtual Private Network to Hide Your IP Address
A user’s IP address may be used to determine their physical location down to the nation, city, and even postal code if they so want. You won’t be giving up your physical address, but cyberstalkers can use your estimated position to verify other information they may already have on you.
Using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) allows you to hide your IP address and, by extension, your location. Plus, a Virtual Private Network will encrypt (or jumble) all of your web traffic. This makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for hackers, government monitoring. Or even your ISP to determine your online activities. It’s fine to use public Wi-Fi for social networking and financial activities like online banking and PayPal. At long last, your Internet service provider will no longer be allow to sell your personal information to unscrupulous marketers.
Consider implementing two-factor authentication (2FA)
If you haven’t already heard enough about 2FA, we apologize. Indeed, it can be inconvenient to employ a third party gadget only to access one’s Twitter account and peruse one’s feed of memes. Two-factor authentication (2FA) is your first line of security in case your account is ever hack. Whether via phishing or some other means.
Even while authenticator apps like Google Authenticator and Authy are preferable to SMS-based 2FA. The latter is still a significant improvement over the former. Unfortunately, providing your phone number to a website in itself poses a privacy risk. To add insult to injury, hackers may be able to deceive phone services into giving them access to your account, rendering SMS 2FA useless.
As a matter of fact, cyber bullies may circumvent this kind of protection in a variety of ways. Read more about how to spot dangers in non-digital environments by clicking the link provided at the beginning of the article.
