How to lock down your social media accounts

Dana Davis

Chat apps—​whether you use Apple Messages, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, or Facebook Messenger—often host your most personal conversations. Set them up as privately and securely as possible.

If you’ve been following our Simple Online Security series, you already know the two most important things you can do to protect your chats: use a unique password and enable two-factor authentication whenever possible. Beyond that, every chat app has a different process to set it up properly. We have specific instructions for the tweaks you can make to protect your messaging on the most popular apps.

Popular cloud storage services like Dropbox or iCloud can be convenient for everyday storage, but they aren’t the most secure choices for storing or sharing truly sensitive info.

If you have a password manager, you may already have the best place for storing personal files, as the best password-management apps let you add encrypted files right alongside your logins and passwords—so they’re great for family documents such as wills, medical records, or a copy of your passport. One password manager we like, Bitwarden, also includes a specific tool for sending files to other people, or you can use a secure standalone tool we like called Tresorit Send. Both of these options are good if you need to send a file just once, such as to an accountant.

You shouldn’t send sensitive files over email, but if you have to, some programs, including Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Adobe Acrobat, and Preview, allow you to password-protect and encrypt files when you save them. Doing so makes them safer to email. Just be sure to share the password separately, through a text or phone call.

Dana Davis

Online accounts, especially on social media, tend to collect and share data about you. But you can restrict some of what a company collects, and just as important, you can fine-tune who can and can’t see your profile and activity.

The next time you pull up your accounts on major platforms like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and TikTok, take a minute or two and tweak the privacy settings. If you don’t need your account to be public, make it private. We have a page with more information on where to find these privacy settings on nine of the biggest and most common platforms.

Dana Davis

If you own a lot of connected devices—such as cameras, smart speakers, or smart thermostats—you have special security considerations to keep in mind.

With connected devices, it’s even more important to follow the steps we’ve described in previous weeks for creating unique passwords, enabling two-factor authentication, and employing automatic updates. Most reputable companies, especially those that can store especially sensitive information such as a live camera feed, should support all three of these features. On our site, we describe details and some shortcuts for major services.

Also, take a closer look at the settings for the device (or the app that you use to control it) to tweak any privacy settings the app might offer. Doing so at least allows you some control over what kinds of data the company can access and what the public can see.

This is our last week in your inbox, but it’s not the end of the Simple Online Security project as a whole. We have more security and privacy advice on our site for specific situations, from online dating to disposing of old hard drives. And we’ll be keeping these guides up to date and adding more as time goes on, so if you have suggestions or questions you want answered, simply reply to this email.