Social media, despite being some of the safer places to be online, still pose a variety of threats – both internal and external. Their status as hubs for communities and data sharing makes them desired targets for scammers and data hunters of various sorts and kinds.
Fortunately, there are plenty of measures on how to stay safe on social media, and protect yourself and your data while browsing through social media. Some of them are old as stone, but some of them use modern technologies that wouldn’t be available even a few years ago. As such, data protection couldn’t be simpler now.
Preamble
It’s important to note that, just as data protection is becoming more and more sophisticated, so does data hunting. In a similar way, there are plenty of ways to steal your data, your account, or your money – both low-tier and highly professional. It’s very unlikely that you’ll encounter some of the more professional measures, but you never know.
Typical data hunting is still very much common. People try to scam you in the DMs, fish for all sorts of information on you, or try to lure you out into a shady website where they could infect your computer with a virus or still your data with a lot more ease. In short, there are plenty of ways to get duped, but also many ways to avoid being duped.
Avoid Links
Unless a link is given to you by a trustworthy source – i.e. a friend or a trusted community – you should never go through it. It’s a number one rule throughout the Internet, but many people forget about it on a regular basis. Even one second on a seemingly popular website can ruin your privacy.
What’s more, you shouldn’t underrate how well the links are hidden nowadays. Hidden links can be behind ads (obviously), and app icons, but also simple text and what seems to be emoji links to YouTube, pictures, and videos. Most social media forbid these, but you can be one step ahead and download a Link Grabber extension.
Look Out for Sham Accounts
The art of creating and managing sham accounts is constantly evolving. Most people only deal with occasional scam attempts at the DMs. The typical approach is to either create an account similar to one of your friends or simply highjack the accounts themselves. Then, they write to you for help or to go to some link.
Low-tier scammers don’t bother to get into the background of their targets. They simply steal an account or make a loose semblance of it and spam as many DMs as possible with a messaging bot. At times, you can be targeted by a more cunning sort of data thief.
They can absolutely steal an account of your friend, see the way they talk to their friends, imitate that style, and send a similar message to only a handful of good friends. This is more bothersome, but it does typically bear more fruit. They also don’t outright ask for money, but rather send links to places where they could steal people’s data.
The protection measures are the same. Firstly, don’t give your money to people on the Internet. Secondly, mind the links. If you don’t know whether the link is legit or harmful, use a free URL Checker tool.
Use VPN
VPN is typically used by people to ‘change’ locations or remain anonymous. However, because of the way VPN services filter your signals through their own hardware social media will think it’s the VPN hardware that uses their features, and not you. As such, they’ll only interact with their data, and not yours.
This is important because companies behind Facebook and Twitter are known to take your data and use it however they want. In many ways, it’s even more harmful than malicious links. Social media often sells your personal data to data-gathering marketing companies, which will then distribute such info to their clients – various businesses and corporations.
Even free VPN services can help you immensely by essentially supplanting your device with their own. It means they won’t know where you are, who you are, as well as what you like, what communities you visit, and what you discuss with your friends. Suffice it to say, that’s an incredible breach of user privacy – one that almost got Facebook banned in Europe.
Of course, you don’t need some high-end VPN to protect data from social media. However, it’s also used for many other critical purposes, which is reason enough to get yourself a subscription-based VPN.
