Keeping Yourself Safe On Facebook

Karoline Rose, a Montana Farm Bureau member and owner of KRose Marketing, shares some Facebook security tips and tricks for helping keep yourself safe on social media.

Everyone who has a Facebook page should put security at the top of their priorities list, including business owners. There are countless routes hackers have found to obtain private information that could be hurtful to you personally or your business (or both). If you haven’t taken action already, it’s time to learn how to protect yourself. Did you know Facebook can use your mobile device microphone to listen to your conversations? I don’t want to scare you, but I do want to drive home the importance of taking these precautions to heart to prevent possible disasters.

Delegating social media responsibilities to an employee is often a great plan, but don’t let anybody be an administrator other than yourself. You can easily add people as ‘editors’ without giving them all the power. This allows the social media delegate to post from your page, but they can never take it over or kick you out. If someone leaves your company, they could feel motivated to retaliate. It’s best to play it safe and never hand the administrative powers away.

I want to assure you, it’s more than OK to filter negative reviews and comments. We all know there are vengeful groups online who are actively trying to destroy certain agricultural fields and the companies associated with them. If someone gives you a bad review and you have never worked with the person, delete their review. If more bad than good reviews are coming in, you can completely disable reviews. Along the same lines, if you are getting a lot of one star reviews from vindictive people, you can disable star ratings. To hide negative comments all you have to do is hover your cursor over the upper right hand corner of the comment you wish to hide. An X will appear. Select it and the comment is gone.    

It’s important to get familiar with your security settings. Facebook provides step-by-step instruction on many of these issues. One issue you should monitor is how many places you are logged in. Log into Facebook through a web browser and go to the account settings page. Select “Security” on the left side of the browser window. Select “Where You’re Logged In” on the Security Settings page. Once you get to this point you can log out of all the places where you don’t want to be logged in.

Making difficult to crack passwords is a good idea for everything you log into. I know it seems hard to try to remember dozens of unique passwords. The good news is you don’t have to have photographic memory to keep your passwords private and organized. There are a bunch of password managers — both free and at cost — that will keep each password safe and only accessible to you. Reusing passwords is a very dangerous habit. If you did become a target to a hacker, they would only have to crack your code once and could access your bank account, email, PayPal, social media accounts, and more. Some password managers give you the option to sign into your favorite sites automatically, which provides you improved security. You can also find features that will encrypt your login information, credit cards, addresses, and other private material.

It’s also crucial to protect your photos and videos. An easy way to deter people from taking your images is uploading much smaller versions of the original, which results in lower quality when screen shot or downloaded. You can use basic photo editing to add a watermark, or you can simply download an app like Marksta, iWatermark, or PhotoMarkr and it will do it for you.

I mentioned Facebook can listen to your conversations, but fortunately, there is an easy fix. First, the microphone only operates when a person has the app open and the microphone feature is enabled. To disable it:  

On an iPhone: 

• Go into your phone’s “Settings” and scroll down until you find the Facebook app, tap it open. You will find Facebook alphabetically with all the other apps on your phone. 
• Under “Facebook” there will be a list labeled “Allow Facebook to Access.” The microphone and camera will both be under this list.
• Select the toggles to disable or enable any of the features you think are a privacy violation (location, camera, microphone). 

• Go into your settings and tap on “Applications” then “Application Manager.”
• Once in “Application Manager,” look for the Facebook app and tap on “More” (top right corner).
• You’ll now see a list of options, tap on “Permissions.”
• Under “Permissions” you’ll have the option to disable the microphone (simply tap on it) and other features like the camera.

There might be a lot of ways to compromise the security of your Facebook page, but as you can see, there are also many opportunities to protect yourself. Take action now to safeguard your online presence.