12 simple steps to safer social networking

March 27, 2013

Confession time: I'm an inveterate social media junkie. From Facebook to Instagram to Diaspora, whenever a new communication platform rolls around—or comes back around—I'm ready to leap aboard. But social networks are amazing and terrifying in equal measure. You can reach thousands of people worldwide with a single Twitter update, but cybercriminals can use the same tools to pick the perfect victim. It's impossible to remain completely anonymous while you're using social media—anonymity would defeat the point—but every network has a few key, commonly overlooked privacy settings that take only minutes to set up and drastically improve the security of your shared data. For this article, I rounded up the three most important privacy settings you should be using, but probably aren't, on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Instagram. Five minutes of setup now could avert hours of social embarrassment and identity recovery down the road. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2031456/12-simple-steps-to-safer-social-networking.html#tk.rss_howto