Today’s Cybersecurity tip is: review your connected accounts
Many websites allow you to sign in using your credentials from another service (like Google, Facebook, or Twitter). While this is convenient, depending on what you agreed to when you connected the account, they may be seeing more information or have more access than you intend. Not only that, but these connections are sometimes set to not expire, so you give some other company access to your information long after you’ve stopped using their service.
Fortunately there’s a relatively easy fix. Spend a few minutes today reviewing your connected accounts and ensure only the services you want connected stay that way. Here’s how to check your connected apps in the big three:
- Visit your account permissions page and sign in with your Google account
- Log into Facebook and go to Settings -> Apps
- Log into Twitter and go to Settings and privacy -> Apps
See how easy they make it? All three tell you what level of access the connected app has and when it last connected. You might be surprised how many connections you have. When I first started doing this years ago, I had apparently connected an app I only ever used once and granted it full permission to my Twitter account (back before Twitter was better about limiting access of third party services); and it had had those permissions for almost a year. Oof.
Short and sweet today, but you will definitely feel better knowing you’ve cleared house of some backdoor access to your social media and private information.
See you tomorrow!