5th Day: Don’t Tell Facebook You Won’t Be Home for the Holidays

Holiday Security Tips: On the fifth day of Christmas, the experts gave to me, 5 Facebook fixes

In general, we share too much information on social media sites. During the holidays, we are positively intoxicated with the giving spirit! Without thinking, we share our holiday travel plans, click on seemingly charitable links or post pictures of a fun night out. And when you share with friends on Facebook, you are sharing with their friends and ultimately, most of the literate world. The problem is, some of those people aren’t really friends and only want to separate you from your holiday dollars.

Solution: Apply these five fixes to ALL of your social sharing (not just Facebook)

Customize your privacy settings. Sixty percent of social network users are unaware that their default privacy settings let others into most of their personal information. Facebook does a decent job of explaining how to lock your privacy down(https://www.facebook.com/help/privacy) but you must spend at least 90 minutes going over the settings to properly protect yourself.
Protect your passwords. Don’t let the bad guys take over your account and contact your friends as if they were you. Create a unique, strong, alpha-numeric-symbol password without using a dictionary word, birthdate, pet’s name or other personal identifier. Use this password only for a single site and don’t share it with anyone. Be careful of using your Facebook login for other sites, as those sites gain access to your private information.
Log into Facebook only ONCE each session. If it looks like Facebook is asking you to log in a second time, skip the links and directly type www.facebook.com into your browser address bar. Phishing emails and social media posts will often send you to sites that look like Facebook but act like a data criminal. When in doubt, log out.
Beware of free offers, big discounts and requests for charity (even if they come from your friends). If the offer in the post is too enticing, too good to be true or too bad to be real, don’t click. Chances are pretty good that your friend’s account has been hijacked and the hacker is serving you a warm dish of malware. If the post is out of character for that friend, email them and ask if it’s real.
Don’t check in when you aren’t home and don’t post your travel plans. Based on social media feeds and locational check-in services alone (Foursquare), it is simple to map your whereabouts and signal thieves when you aren’t home. If you have to let friends know where you are during the holidays, send a group text or email.

No matter if you’re headin’ home for the holidays or off to Whoville, remember to post your pictures and tell those tales AFTER you’re safely home. On the sixth day of Christmas…

To review our tips from previous days, click here.

John Sileo is an an award-winning author and keynote speaker on identity theft, internet privacy, fraud training & technology defense. John specializes in making security entertaining, so that it works. John is CEO of The Sileo Group, whose clients include the Pentagon, Visa, Homeland Security & Pfizer. John’s body of work includes appearances on 60 Minutes, Rachael Ray, Anderson Cooper & Fox Business. Contact him directly on 800.258.8076.

Posted by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo in Identity Theft Prevention and tagged “Holiday ID Theft”, “Online scams”, “Prevent Identity Theft”, “Preventing Identity Theft”, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Facebook, Facebook Privacy Settings, holiday, Holiday Identity Theft, Holiday Scams, holiday security tips, Holiday Shopping, John Sileo, Sileo, twitter privacy.