Safe And Responsible Social Media Practices: How To Stay Safe Online?
Yes isn’t we all does it and don’t hate it! The scroll! The mindless rhythmic motion of the thumb is a thing of beauty! We’re watching someone else’s vacation, someone else’s pretty cat.
The point you miss is this: every minute that you are spending on Instagram, TikTok, or X is time not spent in service of the customer. You are the product! It’s simply how the mechanics of the thing function. It takes from you, and you can take from it in return! With details, attention, and habits. Remember that!
The platforms themselves? They need your data. Both the photos and the timing were important. Who do you follow? Where you pause. If you’re deluding yourself about the systems, you’re not looking. We need to be more guarded.
The Key Fob and the Five-Cent Error
My biggest frustration? The silly, simple mistakes people make that no software can fix. It’s like leaving your car keys in the driveway. The door is right there.
Take location services. Everyone knows “don’t geotag,” sure. But what about the background permissions? Did you check? Your phone knows everything. It records where you go. Even when the app shuts down. Some third-party apps, those little side things that seem fun, demand continuous access to GPS. Why a picture filter needs to know you stopped at the pharmacy on Tuesday is anyone’s guess. A bad guess, frankly.
You need to root around in the general operating system settings. Forget the app settings for a minute. Go to your main phone settings, whatever it is. Specifically look at location permissions for every single social platform you have. Is it set to “Only While Using”? Good. Change anything set to “Always.” That is a silent data bleed.
Friends Are the Weakest Link, Period.
You’ve got hundreds of “friends.” How many of them would you hand your house keys to? Not many. Your social circle is, computationally speaking, a disaster waiting to happen. Prune it.
People are noisy. Really noisy. They talk about you. They tag your kids. They put the high school’s name, the neighborhood pool. Everything. That’s why you’ve got to prune. The people you don’t recognize anymore. Delete. The ones who post vaguely aggressive political screeds? Gone. It isn’t paranoia. It’s a risk assessment.
It’s easy to dismiss this. But you must think about the design. It’s made to hook you. Which, by the way, has real consequences. In June 2024, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy called for social media to carry a warning label, like tobacco, stating the platforms are “associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.”
This isn’t just about security, is it? It’s about total wellness. Something we forget. It’s not just the external threat. It’s the internal one.
The App Permission Abyss
This is the big one. We clicked “Log in with Facebook” one time, three years ago, to play a game about planting digital cabbages. Now that third-party game developer still has access to your full friend list and maybe even your email. Did you know you can check that list? You can.
On both Facebook and Instagram, there is a section, it’s usually called “Apps and Websites” or “Your Activity Off Meta Technologies”, that lists every single external service you’ve ever linked. You must, I mean absolutely must, go through that list and hit “Remove” on every service you don’t instantly recognize or actively use. It will take a while. It’s tedious work. It’s supposed to be.
The security researchers at SANS Institute, a reputable outfit for network knowledge, always stress this point: The single greatest point of failure for an account takeover is not a weak password. It’s the unmonitored, third-party token access that an attacker can exploit silently. It flies completely under your radar. You won’t even see the notification. It really is the biggest risk.
This is the hard truth, but we need to face it: Digital security is a chore, not a one-time setup.
Two Simple Rules That Feel Weird
Here are two things that seem backwards, but work.
Rule One: Lie about your identity markers. Seriously. Don’t use your actual birthday. Don’t use your real mother’s maiden name. (Especially if it’s a possible security question somewhere else.) Just make it up. Fake birthday party time. Who will ever know? And why do they need to? They don’t.
Rule Two: Delete the photo, then post. If you take a picture, say, of your car being fixed at the mechanic, and you accidentally capture the street sign. You crop it, you post it. But the original photo still exists on your device with the full GPS coordinates embedded in its metadata.
Delete the original image from your phone’s photo library first. Then take the screen grab of the edited version. Then post that. It’s an extra, clunky step, but it breaks the GPS link before it goes anywhere. Messy, I know. But effective.
It makes the entire process feel less polished. Less like an automated transaction.
This is all about making yourself a difficult, annoying target. We can’t stop using the porch swing, but we can definitely draw the blinds.
What’s the one forgotten app you’re going to delete access for right now?
Would you like the exact click-by-click instructions for cleaning up those third-party app permissions for both Facebook and Instagram?
