Social media is an excellent way to connect and stay in touch with loved ones and close friends. However, sometimes the apps can go a step too far and cross over into violating your privacy.

Many social media apps have features that share your location, let people know that you are online, and show whether you have read someone’s message.

If you want to reduce your digital footprint on your quest for more privacy, we’ve got you cover. Here are some of the most effective tips you must implement.

Sign Up Using A Temporary Email Address

One of the most effective ways to protect your social media privacy is to use a temporary email address.

Each time you create a new social media account you must enter your email address, where an activation email will be sent. While this process takes up hardly any time, your email inbox will likely be full of useless and uninteresting information from the platform you signed up for.

And if they send multiple emails a day, it can quickly begin to feel like they are invading your privacy.

This is when you should consider setting up an anonymous temp mailbox. Set it up such that the emails sent to this address are automatically deleted after an hour. This simple step will make your life that much easier!

Keep Your Personal Information Private

Ensure that you keep any personal details such as your full name and home address to yourself. The same applies to the names of your family and friends.

Keeping such vital information private from prying, malicious eyes will limit the number of cyberattacks, scams, and takeovers that your social media accounts are subjected to.

We know that maintaining your privacy online isn’t easy. There are people out there who will do just about anything to get their hands on your private information. The only real way to keep information completely private is to lock it away or just not post it online in the first place!

Disable All Read Receipts

To completely protect your privacy while using social media, you should turn off all read receipts. These are notifications that let your friends and family know that you have received and read their messages.

It will probably feel a bit odd disabling your read receipts at first. However, when you do it, you’ll soon find that you won’t miss them. You might even feel less burdened and lighter than you otherwise would have.

Wanting to have a little bit of space isn’t the end of the world. By turning off your read receipts you are allowing yourself to have some private time without the worry of others thinking you are ignoring their messages.

Be Selective With Your Audience

There are several ways to limit your audience and increase your privacy on a social media platform. Firstly, you should take advantage of the direct message function to directly contact your loved ones instead of updating a post or status for all of your followers to look at.

If you don’t want to use the direct messaging function, many social media networks offer additional privacy settings that enable select people to see what you are posting about. Take Facebook, for example.

Here, you have the power to choose who sees your content by filtering out specific names under the audience selector as you make your post. The people you exclude will not see your post come up on their newsfeed, which guarantees your privacy!

Avoid Sharing Your Location And Travel Plans

Telling the entire world that your house will be empty for a week or two is simply a disaster waiting to happen! You’re endangering yourself, your home, and even your business by sharing your travel plans with the world.

Sharing your location will be to your detriment. It might sound dramatic but burglars, kidnappers, and thieves will take this as a chance to steal your valuable items and potentially even put your life in danger!

Create Strong Passwords

Don’t use easy-to-find personal details within your password as they can be very easy to track. This includes birthdays, family and friends’ names, and house numbers. Instead, you should use a random mix of symbols, letters, and alphanumeric characters to make things more complicated, and prevent hackers from gaining access to your socials.

Summary

As technology advances, so do the skills of hackers. This is why ensuring you have privacy on social media platforms is more important now than ever before. By creating strong passwords, limiting personal information, and being more cautious, you can have a private online presence.