By: SEAN YANG
Staff Writer
This is a continuation of Internet Safety, a basic guide on how to keep your accounts and privacy secure. You can read the second part about misinformation and phishing attacks here.
Being on social media inherently means that you have a larger digital attack surface—you give the service you’re using data about yourself as the exchange for using their service, and you reveal information (whether limited or not) about yourself to the rest of the internet. It is also extremely important to prevent inadvertent privacy leaks, especially for teenagers, who are strongly affected and influenced in multiple aspects mentally, socially, and physically by these platforms. In this last part of Internet Safety, we will discuss methods for keeping your digital life as far away as possible from your personal, private life.
The most obvious way to keep each of your profiles separate from each other is to create completely new accounts/identities associated with each account. This would mean having a separate category of accounts for your private life, work, school, etc. Because many platforms and services require an email address to sign up, the easiest way would be to separate your identities via email. Using different usernames is also a clear way to separate these identities: use your real name for work and school purposes and have different pseudonyms for your personal and social accounts. Not only will your accounts be organized underneath a category, making it easier to find emails, notifications, and other types of relevant information to the account, but they will also have no general overlap with each other, making it harder to connect each account to one another in the case of an attack.
What if your social media was inherently tied to your public identity? While account separation is still valid in this situation, it is even more important to make sure your privacy (and reputation) stays intact online. The first step is to turn off any geolocation services that could reveal your whereabouts. While they may make it easier to connect with people in the same area, it is simply not secure enough to justify showing off this information to anyone who can view your profiles. Secondly, refrain from posting sensitive information about yourself as much as possible beyond your face, age, name, and/or your state residence. While that information provides little threat to your security by itself, being too specific can lock you into a position you may not want to be in—you end up being “confined” to this identity without having a way to get out of it, save for discarding it completely.