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If you’re concerned about your privacy on social media, you have plenty of company. Here’s something else you have — a great way to lock it down.
Just how concerned are people about their privacy on social media? We asked. Worldwide, 73% of social media users said they’re highly concerned with their security and privacy on social media platforms.
And for parents of teens, those concerns about privacy on social media weigh even heavier. Fresh insights published by Pew Research[i] reveal that nearly 1 in 5 teens in the U.S. said they’re on YouTube and TikTok “almost constantly.”
With social media usage and privacy concerns so high, we created McAfee’s Social Privacy Manager.
If you’ve ever taken a dive into the privacy settings on your social media accounts, you know just how deep they can go. And if you haven’t, it can involve dozens of individual menus and settings. In all, it can get tricky when it comes time to setting them the way you like. It’s a lot of work. Plenty of work when you consider how platforms change and update their settings over time.
Our Social Privacy Manager does that work for you, automatically adjusting more than 100 privacy settings across all the accounts you choose. As a result, you can reduce the amount of data being collected and ensure your info is only visible to the people you want to share it with — which can help keep your personal info out of the wrong hands. As we’ll see, social media provides a wealth of info that hackers and scammers can potentially use against you.
That’s why privacy on social media matters so much. Let’s start with a look at what bad actors are up to on social media and at how much time teens are spending on it. From there, we’ll hop into how quickly and easily McAfee’s Social Privacy Manager can help keep you and your family far safer than before.
Social media – the goldmine for hackers and scammers
For some time, we’ve seen how hackers and scammers use social media to fuel their attacks and scams. It’s an open book. A book about you. Your likes, your life, not to mention the photos of where you go, what you like to do, and who you do it with. That info is as good as gold for hackers and scammers.
With that exacting kind of info, bad actors out there can commit identity theft and cook up phishing scams using relevant info about you. An analogy explains how. Your identity is like a puzzle, and various pieces of personal info are the pieces. With enough pieces, a bad actor can put together a puzzle picture of you. One that’s complete just enough to open a loan, make an insurance claim, or pose as you in some way.
For those pieces, they’ll turn to info found on the dark web, info readily available from online data brokers, and yet more info from social media. Already, we have products and features that protect your identity on the dark web and that help remove your info from sketchy data broker sites. Now, our Social Privacy Manager helps you shut down one more source of info from bad actors — a source they successfully tap into.
According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), scammers recently used social media as a contact method in 11% of the fraud and identity theft cases where victims cited a method.
Source: FTC
While that figure finds itself somewhat in the middle of the pack in terms of contact methods, it was the second-most effective method as it led to a loss 61% of the time. Only ads and pop-ups worked more effectively at 63%, making social media a goldmine for hackers and scammers indeed.
Social media privacy — it’s a family matter too.
Earlier, we mentioned just how much time teens spend on social media. Taking a deeper dive into the numbers provided by Pew Research, we can see a couple of things — the top platforms they use and how often they use them:
YouTube absolutely leads the way with 93% of U.S. teens using that social media platform. Right behind it, TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram. Also on this chart, you can spot the steep ten-year decline of Facebook and Twitter (X), a particularly precipitous drop for Facebook of more than half.
As for how often teens visit these platforms daily, the same names follow in order. YouTube takes the number one spot yet again, with 71% of teens saying they use it daily. In all, teens are telling us that social media factors into a large part of their day. “Almost constantly” for some.
From a parental standpoint, the privacy implications are clear. High use leads to high exposure and the potential privacy risks that follow. Not to mention possible exposure to scams just as adult social media users might encounter.
Without question, this makes privacy on social media a family matter.
Now for the good news – how to make yourself more private on social media.
While social media provides bad actors with another avenue to commit crimes online, you can still use social media safely in a way that reduces your risk.
With our Social Privacy Manager, you can determine what you do and don’t want to share. It scans the accounts you enter and offers suggestions that can improve your privacy. You select which ones you want to enable, and the app makes the updates with a single click.
Making it even simpler, you can also secure your privacy based on what kind of social media user you are. Whether you just tend to hang back, explore, or put yourself out there a bit more, there’s a privacy setting for you. And if you change your mind, it can help change your settings whenever you like.
If it all seems rather straightforward and simple, it is. We designed it so that you don’t have to dig through menu after menu to uncover every setting and then make the informed choice you want to make. The app does the work for you. And you can run it any time and update your settings as you like. In fact, we suggest running checks regularly as platforms can and do change their privacy settings and policies.
And as we saw above, teens are on social media. A lot. Note that you can use our Social Privacy Manager on the accounts your teens have too. It’s just a matter of running through the same steps with each of their accounts. This way, everyone in the family can boost their privacy on social media.
You can find McAfee’s Social Privacy Manager in our McAfee+ online protection plans. In conjunction with a host of other features like Identity Monitoring and Personal Data Cleanup, you can thoroughly protect your privacy and identity. On social media and anywhere else your travels take you online.
You can take a peek of Social Privacy Manager here:
Want to be more private on social media? Now you can, more easily than before.
In all, the last several years have seen numerous advances that make it easier, and quicker, to protect your privacy and identity. Old, manual processes that were spread out across umpteen sites and services are now automatic. And guided too. McAfee’s Social Privacy Manager stands as yet one more of those advances.
True, going online carries its risks. Social media complicates them more so. Yet you can reduce those risks, significantly so. You really can lock down your privacy. Quickly and easily, for you and your family.
[i] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/12/11/teens-social-media-and-technology-2023/
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