• When registering your account, do not provide sensitive personal information where this is not absolutely necessary. Sensitive personal information includes, among others, your social security number, passport number, physical address, phone number, date of birth, bank account information or your family members’ personal information. This information can easily be used for impersonation or socially engineered scams.
  • Check your privacy settings (and that of your relatives as well), and exercise control and foresight over what you post and to who this is available. Official links to six social media platforms with examples on how to control privacy settings can be found below:

Facebook   Twitter   Instagram  LinkedIn   VKontakte  Weibo

  • Check app permissions carefully. Permissions granted to various app can allow these to gather information about your exact location, as well as information related to your email account, on the basis of their Terms and Conditions. Some apps may also gather information unrelated to the usage of the app, accessing your personal information from messages and storing one – time passwords.
  • Close the accounts that you’re not using. There is a high risk that old social media accounts will be compromised due to weak passwords used in the past, or due to weak two factor authentication with questions that can easily be answered by strangers, e.g. “What is the name of your pet?”.
  • Delete third-party account connections: It is not necessarily wrong to have your Facebook or Twitter accounts connected to other apps, but you should keep these connections to a minimum and remove the ones that you are not using. For example, if you use Facebook to sign-up for an app, you may grant this app read-write access to potentially sensitive information on your Facebook profile. Visit the following section (link) of the Facebook help center to find out how to minimize the Facebook permissions granted to apps