How to protect personal data on Facebook
Social networks are a place to make friends and interact with people, but they can also easily expose a lot of private personal information if you're not careful.
Facebook is facing a lot of criticism, even a major crisis due to the scandal of exposing personal information of 50 million users. The reason comes from Facebook's failure to ensure the safety of personal data from their users, allowing companies like Cambridge Analytica to secretly exploit it.
The way Facebook has always operated has allowed many third-party applications on their platform to access personal information and private data. In addition to the quizzes, fortune-telling, survey applications... that are everywhere on Facebook, websites, software or games that can use Facebook accounts to log in can also collect a lot of personal information.
Many users do not have the habit of carefully reviewing what private data of theirs is shared when registering an account or using an application.
Therefore, there are cases where even though it is a game, FarmVille requires access to a lot of personal data on Facebook accounts, from personal photos and videos to even religious and political views. Some other applications and software can also operate on behalf of users or manage advertising, manage businesses of linked pages and groups...
To protect private data, users can check the list of applications and software that have access to their personal data in theApplication, partSettingof Facebook. For applications that are suspicious, or are not used often or have been removed, users should remove access for them by clicking the X next to them. You can also access each application individually to see detailed permissions.
Facebook also said that even if you delete an app from your account, the personal data you shared with those apps may still be retained by the developer and you will have to contact them yourself. In the scandal that exposed 50 million user accounts, Facebook said that since 2015, it had asked Cambridge Analytica and its apps to delete the data it improperly collected from users, but it may not have been deleted and used later.
In the settings below, if you do not want to share private personal information with third-party applications on the platform, users should change the default settings from Facebook, deactivateApps, Websites and Pluginsand reduce the amount of personal data shared withApps other people use.
Another step to prevent software and applications from accessing private information data and operating on Facebook without permission is to check again.Activity Log. It provides a complete history of account activity, which can detect suspicious, silently running applications.
Also, in the sectionSettingof Facebook, itemPrivacy. To avoid publicizing personal information, users should not allow external search engines to link to their personal pages, and limit people from being able to search for your account via the phone number or e-mail address used to register.
In settings aboutTimeline and Tagging(tag), users should only leave the display modeFriendorFriends of friendsinstead ofEverybodyto avoid images, videos or personal information being made public and easily spread.
To protect your Facebook account, you should enable "2-factor authentication", "warning when logged in" on strange devices and regularly monitor logged-in devices in the section.Security and loginof the partSetting.
