We all share a depth of personal information online which is vulnerable to misuse.
Below we have set out the best ways to protect your personal information on social media, with specifics for Twitter and Linkedin. You can find our previous advice on Facebook here.
In general, with a personal account, you should make sure your friends or followers online are people that you trust. It is recommended to remove any unnecessary personal information, such as birth dates, addresses or location tags. A public account is of course used for more general broadcast, and therefore you should be careful as to exactly what you publish.
It is highly recommended to use two-factor authentication to protect all your online accounts, particularly social media and especially if you are a brand, company or influencer.
High profile Twitter accounts were recently exposed as a result of a large cyber exploit which used Twitter’s own internal tools. The below suggestions cannot protect accounts if a social network is compromised as in this case, however they can help you reduce the sensitive information you are giving away or to secure your account more privately.
- Make sure location tagging is off in Settings > Privacy and safety > Location information – to stop revealing your location.
- Under Discoverability and contacts, disable email address and phone number discoverability – this is crucial if you wish to tweet privately or anonymously as people cannot find your account using your other personal information.
- Tick Protect for your tweets on the main Privacy and safety screen – this will allow only people who follow you to see tweets from your account, both past and present. Your tweets also won’t be publicly searchable.
- Untick to Receive messages from anyone in the Direct messages section – to allow only people you follow to send you messages.
- Disable photo tagging – to prevent anyone being able to tag you in photos.
- You can use such third party tools as TweetDelete and Tweepi to unfollow users and delete a large amount of tweets.
- It is also possible to backup your tweets by downloading your Twitter data via your account settings. Also useful if you’d like to cleanse or even close your account.
Linkedin works much like a CV where employees, recruiters, colleagues and followers can view your background, experience and education. Be aware of what information you have shared on Linkedin and who is able to view it.
- It’s recommended to remove any unnecessary email addresses or phone numbers from your Linkedin account. Or at least change them from being publicly visible. Don’t forget that LinkedIn allows others users to search for you using all the contact details associated with your account.
- You can also set information such as your date of birth visible to Only Me using the edit option (pencil icon) on your main profile.
- It is suggested to remove any linked social media accounts and change your geographic location data, to reduce the information that can be linked to you.
- If you’re being actively threatened, LinkedIn recommend to immediately restrict access or set your account to private. Please contact us if you need further support.
- Use LinkedIn’s Privacy Settings to set your profile private and select whether or not people outside your contact network can see your name.