No other single organization has been in so much trouble in the recent history as Cambridge Analytica (CA) for it’s alleged involvements in various elections across the world including, USA, India, Brazil and several African countries. Caught in the eye of the maelstrom along with CA is Facebook (FB) the ubiquitous social media site that can be found in every person’s handset.
The so-called psychographic modelling techniques used by CA, which were built in part with the data harvested from Facebook, underpinned the company’s work for the then-Republican nominee and US President Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016.
Now, Mark Zuckerberg has vowed to protect to your social media accounts from such hackers, but there are a few things you can do yourself to protect your social media accounts from hackers. Here are the tips:
- If you don’t use any applications discard it. Inspect your social media accounts and see whether there are any third-party applications that have access to your personal social data. Delete the ones you don’t use or don’t need. You need to make sure that you are Okay with what information they are accessing from your social profile/account since this can be used as gateways to your account for hackers.
- You should be careful who you friend online. Friends request should be accepted from people you know in real life. Hackers often send requests to unknown people to see the information you are sharing so that they can take advantage of it.
- Not always sharing is caring. Check twice at least on privacy settings to control who sees your posts. And be careful what you share online—think of what you post online as being there forever, even if you have privacy setting enabled. For example, sharing that you’re away on vacation could inform a thief that you’re not home and indicate to them it’s a good time to rob you.
- It’s important to use strong passwords and refrain from using “password” as your password, it isn’t going to cut it. The strongest passwords are at least eight characters in length, preferably 12; contain a combination of upper and lower case letters, symbols and numbers, and are unique to each account. If you want more information on how to create strong passwords, you can go to passwordday.org. And should you have trouble remembering and keeping track of all your usernames and passwords, there’s a safe option: use a password manager.
- Enable multi-factor authentication. Imagine a hacker has your password, username and email and even knows the answer to your secret question. He can get into your account. But if you’ve enabled multi-factor authentication, the hacker will need another factor to truly access your account. So without your phone, fingerprint, face or whatever factor you’ve set up, the game’s over for him. With True Key, you have to keep you safe online.