Tag: Security

Long gone are the days of lax security and terrible privacy settings on Facebook. If you know where to look and what you’re looking for, you can easily micro-manage your online privacy and security settings for the social media behemoth. The key, however, is knowing where to look and what you’re looking for.

The following 5 settings are important to your privacy and can be checked easily, right now. This guide uses screen shots from an iPhone, but the directions only mildly vary on Android or the Web.

Before we get started, you might need to know how to access settings.

Look for then tap on the hamburger button, likely on the lower right-hand corner of your screen.

Scroll way down to the bottom of that screen, until you see ‘Settings’.

Tap on Settings, then choose either ‘Account Settings’, ‘Payments Settings’, ‘News Feed Preferences’, or ‘Activity Log’. This guide will focus on ‘Account Settings’.

Recognized Devices

Settings » Account Settings » Security » Recognized Devices

This handy little setting will show you a list of devices that are authorized to access your account without additional verification. Examples would include your smartphone, tablet, and possibly your computer. If you see any devices at all on the list that you aren’t familiar with, don’t own or can’t remember verifying, click the ‘X’. This will remove that device from the approved list and require that device to be re-verified.

Manage Active Sessions

Settings » Account Settings » Security » Where You’re Logged In

This list is likely going to be a bit longer, and will list anywhere that you’ve logged in to Facebook and never logged back out. Clicking the X will automatically log that device out of Facebook next time it tries to access it, so go through the list and make sure nothing looks fishy. When looking at it, try to figure out which device might be your current cell phone, computer, etc, and try to remove any old, dead, or donated devices. Worst case scenario, you just have to log back in next time you use it.

Legacy Contact

Settings » Account Settings » Security » Legacy Contact

Look, I know this one is a bit morbid, but it’s worth setting up. You can find it just below the two settings I’ve already gone through above, and Facebook gives you the option of either passing control of your account on to a trusted family member or friend, or optionally it can be permanently deleted.

Free Up Phone Space

Settings » Account Settings » Browser

Mobile storage is at a premium, so this handy little trick can definitely help. Any time you click a link in Facebook on your phone, it saves a few files (called a “cache”) to help that page load faster next time. Navigate to the Browser Settings and click the big ‘Clear Data’ button to remove all of these temporary files and buy back a bit more storage for your phone.

Disable Video Autoplay

Settings » Account Settings » Videos and Photos

Autoplaying videos as you scroll or load a page should be a capitol offense on the Internet. It needlessly uses data that most people don’t have to spare, can slow down older or less powerful mobile devices, and, frankly, is annoying. Alas, Facebook still enables it by default. Thankfully, they allow you to turn it off completely, only auto-play when you’re connected to wi-fi (to save on mobile data), or leave it on all the time (the default).

Passwords are the bane of everyone’s existence. Every website or app you use wants you to enter in a password, they want it to be unique to them, and many have a set of rules that make remembering your password even more difficult. As a result, the majority of the population resorts to using the same very simple password on every site they visit. The name of a pet, ‘123456’, and even ‘password’ are among the more common examples. The following guide will help you to come up with a complex password that is unique to you, isn’t found in the dictionary, conforms to even the most demanding requirements, can be tweaked to make it unique for each website you use it on, and, perhaps most importantly, is easy for you – and only you – to remember.

To start, lets go over the requirements that the most complex passwords are expected to meet:

Password must be at least 8 digits long.
Use of at least one upper- and and one lower-case letter.
Inclusion of at least one number.
Inclusion of at least one special character ($, #, %, comma, period, etc.).
No words found in the dictionary or that use any personal information.

The password we are about to create will meet all of those requrements.

Step One: A Sentence You’ll Remember

Come up with a sentence that you know you’ll be able to remember. Make sure that it has at least eight words, one proper noun, and one number. Bonus points if you can also work in a special character.

Here’s an example:

I love my wife, Jessie, and our two kids.

Now that you’ve got your sentence, write it down 10 times. Then read it out loud 10 times. This will help you memorize it, after which point we can go on to step two.

Step Two: Compact It

Take the sentence that you now have memorized, and drop everything except the first letter of each word, keeping the letters case-sensitive. Instead of using the first letter of any number, use it’s numeric value. Lastly, convert any words that correlate to a special character. For example, ‘dollars’ will convert to $, ‘percent’ will convert to %, and, in the case of the above example, ‘and’ will convert to &.

Here’s how the example will look:

IlmwJ&o2k

Looks like a pretty great password, right? Well, there’s one last step.

Step Three: Add The Website

For whichever website or app you’re using the password on, tack the obvious 2-3 letter abbreviation for that website on to the tail end of your password. Here are a few common examples, using the example password above:

Facebook: IlmwJ&o2kfb
Twitter: IlmwJ&o2ktw
Google: IlmwJ&o2kggl

There you have it! Three easy steps to create a memorable, impossible to guess, and highly secure password. It will take your brain a while to get used to typing it out quickly, but once you’ve been using it for a week or two you’ll find yourself typing it without even thinking about it.

5 Facebook Settings You Should Check Right Now