How to Protect Your Personal Information on Facebook
With up to 87 million Facebook users’ personal information harvested and passed on to Trump-affiliated political firm Cambridge Analytica, which used it to target voters in the 2016 presidential election, people throughout the world are scrambling to better understand how to protect their personal information on Facebook and other social media outlets.
Before beginning to lock down your account, it’s a good idea to know whether or not your data was shared without your knowledge. This can be done either by waiting for the slow rollout of Facebook notifications that the company promises to post to your News Feed or you can check on it yourself through Facebook’s online Help Center.
What You’re Sharing Your Information With
After you’ve checked if your data was given to Cambridge Analytica, you’ll want to go ahead and see which apps and websites have access to your personal information. This can be done by going into your settings, and then clicking on “Apps and Websites.”
Wired explains, “If you do find apps there that you want to remove—it’s amazing how many you can pile up over the years—keep in mind that they can still hold onto your data after you give them the boot. To be totally free and clear, you have to contact them directly, through their Facebook page or website, and ask them to clear out whatever they have on hand.”
Facebook’s Suggestions for Security
Facebook offers six things you can do to help keep your account safe, but they don’t seem to offer much insight other than what most would consider the most basic of internet security.
Protect your password: Don’t use your Facebook password anywhere else online and don’t let anyone else know it.
Log out of Facebook when you’re done using it on a shared device.
Use anti-virus software.
Think before you click or download anything.
If Facebook’s list doesn’t really make you feel any more secure or informed—don’t worry, you’re not alone.
Put Your Account on Lock Down
The first step toward understanding and gaining control over your social media accounts, especially Facebook, is locking them down. You can tighten up your Facebook account by clicking on the settings and selecting “Privacy” from the options on the right.
Take a look at who can see your future posts and start editing. You’ll most likely want to move it from “Public” to “Friends.” However, if you’re really wanting to keep things private, you can select “Only Me.”
This only takes care of future posts. Now, take a look under “Who Can see my stuff?” Here, you’ll find the option to limit the audience for posts that you’ve already shared with friends of friends or the public. Click on “Limit Past Posts.” After the menu expands and you click on “Limit Old Posts,” a warning box will appear—click confirm.
Once these two major steps have been taken, you can start going through the details of your profile and deciding what you want to make available to friends or the public—like if you want your age to show, your relationship status, and so on.
Protect Your Personal Information on Facebook
What this most recent breach of trust between Facebook and its users—most of whom did not fully understand how much of their personal information they were selling for the privilege of using Facebook—reveals, is the need for individual users, as well as businesses, to be savvier in understanding cybersecurity risks. These risks are heavily compounded for businesses that not only need to protect their own data but are also saddled with the responsibility of protecting the sensitive personal information of employees and clients.
IT solution companies, such as Harrington Technologies, are built to keep your business running smooth and fast, ensuring the highest-level of security for you, your employees, and your clients. Get in touch to learn more!
3 Password Management Tools For Your Business
This might sound obvious, but many people forget that secure passwords are essential to your business. Not only do you have the need to protect your company’s information but are often responsible for protecting client’s information. Failing to do either of these can be detrimental.
Businesses, which often have more than one employee who needs to be able to log in to an account or program, have a unique issue when it comes to password protection. Your data is only as safe as the weakest password in the system.
Though you might have no problem avoiding the most popular—therefore least secure—passwords of 2017, you might still want to go beyond your personal ability to create super-secure passwords and rely on a password manager for keeping your company on lockdown.
The Equifax Data Breach, which exposed more than 140 million American users’ personal information (including social security numbers), inspired huge numbers of people to begin sifting through the dozens of password managers available for one that would work best for them.
To simplify your own research process, here are the top three password management tools for your business.
The LastPass(word) You’ll Ever Need
LastPass is an excellent option for your startup businesses, especially if you’re still not convinced you need a password manager (seriously, you do though).
The company offers a free version and a paid version. However, for individuals, the free version is packed with enough extras that it will be hard to justify spending money on anything else. In addition to serving single consumers, LastPass offers team and enterprise versions, both with free trials.
With an AES-256 bit encryption with PBKDF2 SHA-256 to ensure complete security in the cloud, LastPass allows you to create a master password (ideally, a strong master password) to locally-generate a unique encryption key. This basically breaks down to you needing only one password to access all your accounts.
Get Away Clean with Dashlane
Dashlane claims that “employee adoption is the key to your business’s security — and we’ve built a product they’ll actually want to use.” And, PC Magazine agrees.
According to PC Magazine, “If the password manager interferes with your normal flow, you just might stop using it. Fortunately, Dashlane handles all the basic tasks and more, with flair.”
With Dashlane for Business’s terrific dashboard interface, which provides information on the password health on all devices, it’s not a surprise to hear the company, and PC Magazine, push its user-friendly side. The password manager is designed to be easy for tech-savvy people (as well as the rest of us!) to use.
One of the features of Dashlane, which uses a“military-grade” encryption, allows you to create and organize password categories, as well as limit, revoke, and assign privileges to your team members based on their access level.
You’ll Never Need Another Password Manager Once You Have a Keeper
With the same encryption system as LastPass, Keeper is another standout password management tool. Offering native apps for all popular platforms and browsers, as well as two-factor authentication and secure password sharing and inheritance, it’s no surprise to find Keeper among the top choices for businesses.
Additionally, it offers many of the other features a business owner wants a password manager to include, like retaining a full history of passwords and files; auto-filling web forms and app passwords; and emergency access.
Final Thoughts: 3 Password Management Tools For Your Business
Though LastPass, Dashlane, and Keeper are some of the best password management tools available, there are plenty of others that offer top-flight security and additional features that might be a good match for your businesses.
No matter which password management tool you decided to go with for your business, the most important thing is that you’re taking the necessary steps to protect your business and your clients.
Want extra help with your cyber security? Contact us for a free audit of your business’s security and find loopholes you might not know exist.