Protecting My Social Media Accounts- Laziness is a Hacker’s Best Friend
I have chosen to follow this article’s steps in order to make my social media accounts more secure. I have many reasons for doing this but the most important is to avoid having my valuable information taken and used against me. My mom was (and technically still is) a victim of identity theft recently. She had someone open two credit cards in her name and make purchases using her bank card information and she still has no idea where they could have gotten the information from. It is a very unfortunate event that may not have been avoidable, but the risk factors could have been easily eliminated, had she taken advantage of the various security features on her most used platforms.
I personally have been offered many forms of extra protection online and have declined them because it felt like a nuisance at the time. I am now realizing that my laziness could possibly cause me my personal information and even my identity and have promised to try harder to protect myself against these serious threats. Most of the steps involved were one-time actions and could be done within 10–15 minutes. I will provide a few links for instructions that I found helpful and would recommend for everyone.
First, I decided to compile a list of my most used social media platforms. Those are, in no particular order, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube (where I have 3 separate accounts). After that I went through this article, completing each step for each applicable platform. It took a bit of my time but I now feel much more secure about my internet presence.
The first step offered by the article was to set up two step verification on the sites. This ensures that your social media accounts aren’t being accessed on new devices without your approval. Each one took me less than minutes for each and here are the links for instructions to each platform that I applied it to.
The next thing that i did was reset all of my passwords. In the past i would use the same password for everything but I have now devised various passwords from random letters out of phrases that are special to me. I also incorporated some numbers to ensure variation. With passwords, the longer and more diverse it is, the safer it is.
The final step that I took was to search the internet for any information that I did not want to be public. I could not find any but have made a not to myself to frequently check.
I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to be encouraged to protect myself from the potential dangers of having my social media accounts easy to access. I will be helping my family follow some or all of these steps as well.
