CYBER SECURITY FOR INFLUENCERS

Episode 3/3

DEACTIVE LOCATION SHARING

One final tip for this series. This one won’t necessarily make your account any more secure, but it is something you should be aware of. Most Social Media platforms track your location, and sometimes in ways that you are not aware of. Did you know that photos files typically contain additional metadata such as camera information, time, date, and even GPS coordinates? Hackers are well known for extracting this information from images and videos to track someone online.. Often as part of a doxxing campaign. (doxxing is the act of publicly revealing previously private personal information about an individual or organization)

The good news is according to an experiment run by Kaspersky Labs, most of the major Social Media platforms remove this information automatically for you:

• Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram delete metadata

• Flickr, Google, and Tumblr DO NOT DELETE metadata

However this data is often not removed in chat or instant messaging programs. The point is that you should be aware that this data exists, and can be used to track your location. If you are concerned about this, you should disable geotagging on the device that you use to take photos, or delete the metadata before publishing online.

I hope you take my advice and implement these tips today. Don’t wait for tomorrow, do it right now! These two steps will dramatically improve the security of your social media accounts, and I hope that you have a great rest of your day!