Facebook, by some estimates, has 34 million-plus users in India and it’s not just the young generation that has embraced the social network site in such large numbers – even our uncles and aunts seem to have fallen in love with Mark Zuckerberg’s creation.
Your Facebook account includes so much personal information, from your photographs and the messages you exchange with friends, to your phone number and birthday.
It should therefore come as no big surprise that people with malicious intentions are working hard to gain access to this treasure trove of information. In fact, an official figurereleased by Facebook itself states that about 600,000 of daily logins worldwide are compromised. That’s a big number.
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Fortunately, Facebook does offer quite a few security features that make it easy for you to protect your account and prevent your personal information from falling into the wrong hands.
One, you should always associate your mobile phone number with your Facebook account and then turn on “Login Notifications.” The site will then send you an instant text message whenever your account is accessed from an unknown computer or mobile phone.
You can add one or more mobile phone numbers to your account here while the login notifications can be enabled here. If you get a login notification while you are away from the computer – or are not using Facebook – you can quickly lock your account by following the link in the notification. Also change your password so that the other person won’t be able to log into your account from any other device.
If you have used Facebook on a public computer, or if you share your computer with multiple people, always make it a habit to check your activity logs. This has a list of all computers and mobile devices from where you have used Facebook recently, so you pretty much know if anyone else has accessed your Facebook from a computer you have used in the past. The same page also offers an option for you to remotely end a session in case you forgot to log out of Facebook on another computer.
It will also help if you periodically review all the apps that are associated with your Facebook account. While none of these apps will ever have access to your login credentials, some may have been granted access to your personal details like date of birth. Review the list here. It may not be a bad idea to remove apps that you have not used for a long time – say, for more than six months.
Finally, enable the “Trusted Friends” feature in your Facebook account. This is a relatively new security setting that will help you quickly recover your account in case you forgot the password or have lost access to the email account that was associated with your Facebook account. You pick a list of 3-5 users on Facebook who you trust and they will be sent a recovery code for your account. You just have to collect these codes and will be able to get into Facebook again without having to contact its support team. The Trusted Friends setting can be accessed here.
via WSJ
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