Social media is where we share pieces of our lives, connect with others, and discuss anything from pop culture to politics and activism – but it's also where we can be most vulnerable. From companies "mining" our data to better target us with ads to governments monitoring our political statements and strangers stalking us, how we use social media may threaten our privacy and have real-life consequences.
Determining how to manage social media to best protect our privacy depends on who we are – for instance, our immigration status, line of work, and where we reside – and what we use social media for. Whatever your risks and needs, this guide will help you think through the privacy threats inherent to using social media and how to mitigate those threats.
Thinking about data on social media
Your data stored on social media platforms can be divided into three categories:
Public data
This is all the data that is publicly accessible for anyone to see.
In theory, only the name you use on each social media platform and your profile picture should be publicly visible, so people can find you but see nothing more about you. But in practice, most social media platforms have default settings where a lot of your data is publicly visible: your list of friends (or people that you follow and people who follow you), the posts you publish, and your comments and likes on other people's posts. Unless you went to your account settings to change your privacy preferences, all of this may be visible to everyone, even people you don't know or have a relationship with.
