Is your Facebook profile private? The implicit deal you strike when you sign up for any social media account is that you get to use their services for free in exchange for your privacy. You scroll, post, and message all while sites collect your data to serve you ads, and you hand over more and more personal information about yourself.
Facebook is notoriously careless when it comes to protecting your data. The company has been tangled in several privacy debacles in the last few years, from the Cambridge Analytica scandal to hacked accounts and security breaches. The site is also the biggest culprit when it comes to getting people to fork over their personal information. Your Facebook profile includes a long list of items that make you vulnerable: your name, age, birthday, hometown, current location, job history, education, marital status, family relationships, places you’ve checked into, even your likes and interests. All of this information can be used by bad actors to create a detailed dossier on you and your life, and target you for hacking and other threats.
Facebook does have privacy settings that allow users to make their profile pages private, semi-private, or totally public. But a private profile doesn’t protect you quite like you think. Even if it’s supposed to only be visible by friends, your profile is still open to indexing by search engines. A major threat to your privacy on Facebook is the security of your friend’s accounts. If one or more of your friends’ Facebook accounts is hacked, then the hacker will have access to your content and personal information.
Although it’s difficult to put a definitive number on how often social media accounts get hacked, we’ll just say it happens a lot. To give you an idea, Google reports that 20% of social accounts will be compromised at some point. Social engineering and phishing scams are the most common. Hackers can pretend to be Facebook to get you to hand over your login info and lock you out of your account. They can impersonate you, reading your posts to mimic your online voice, and scam your friends list, coworkers, and workplace. In the worst-case scenario, cyberstalkers can use your information—restaurants you’ve checked into, frequent locations, hometown, office location—to present a real-life threat.
Even if your information is completely hidden, there are a few other privacy-invasive settings that feel unsettling. For one, the platform uses facial recognition, and automatically tags you or a friend in a photo or video. Additionally, people you aren’t technically ‘friends’ with can see your posts by ‘following’ you instead, and you may not even notice. The privacy settings are an impossible to navigate labyrinth. New features that Facebook implements can inadvertently open up loopholes that people can exploit to view your content, even if you’ve opted to keep it private.
Creeped out yet? If deleting your Facebook isn’t an option, do everything you can to lock down your privacy settings and remove any personal information from your profile. Hush can help by finding, flagging and eliminating vulnerabilities from the Internet to keep your identity safe.
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