Social Media Privacy: Share Without Oversharing
Scammers, stalkers and burglars all read social media. Profiles answer the questions criminals would otherwise have to ask: where you live, when you’re away, who your family is, what your first pet was called. You don’t have to quit — you have to stop publishing your own dossier.
Lock down the accounts
- Set profiles to private / friends-only where the platform allows it, and periodically prune followers you don’t actually know.
- Turn on 2FA for every social account — hijacked profiles are used to scam your friends in your name, which is far more effective than a stranger’s message.
- Review third-party app access (Settings → Apps/Connected apps) and revoke anything you don’t recognise or no longer use.
- Check what your profile looks like to a stranger — most platforms have a “view as” option or just open it in a private browsing window.
Watch what the posts reveal
- Don’t post travel in real time. “Two weeks in Portugal!” tells everyone your house is empty for two weeks. Post the photos when you’re back.
- Strip the metadata clues: photos can reveal your street from house numbers, car plates, landmarks and reflections. Platforms remove GPS EXIF data on upload, but what’s in the image stays.
- Those “fun” quiz posts are password questions. First car, childhood street, mother’s maiden name — that’s the account-recovery quiz for your bank. Skip them, and when sites force security questions on you, give fictional answers stored in your password manager.
- Announcing new jobs, big purchases or inheritances marks you for targeted scams — the “pig-butchering” playbook starts with exactly this reconnaissance. See how to spot scams.
Protect the kids (and the grandparents)
- Don’t publish children’s full names, school names or birthdays together — those three plus a photo are an identity-theft starter kit. Consider freezing kids’ credit (how).
- Talk to older relatives about romance scams and fake celebrity/investment accounts — losses fall hardest on over-60s in FBI data. Agree they’ll run any “urgent money” request past you first.
Reduce your existing footprint
- Search your own name (in quotes) plus your city and see what surfaces.
- Delete old accounts you no longer use — each is a breach waiting to expose a reused password.
- Request removal from data-broker/people-search sites; it meaningfully cuts spam, scam calls and doxxing risk.