The penetration of social media is continuously increasing worldwide. The tremendous growth in use of social media platforms/ social networking platforms has provided a fertile ground to cyber criminals to engage in illegal activities. The increased usage of internet services and smartphones has made social networking one of the most popular online activities. Social media enables users to connect, communicate and share information, photographs or videos with anyone across the globe.
Some of the popular social media platforms are :
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Linkedin, YouTube,WhatsApp, Tinder, Hike, WeChat, Tumblr etc.
How to Protecct Your Information
Here are some of important steps you should take to protect yourself and your information while using social media platforms:
- Immediately inform the social media service provider, if you notice that a fake account has been created by using your personal information.
- Do not share your vacations, travel plans etc. on social media.
- Always keep location services turned off on your devices unless necessary.
- Share your photos and videos only with your trusted friends by selecting right privacy settings on social media.
- Always use a strong password by using alphabets in upper case and lower case, numbers and special characters for your social media accounts.
- Do not allow social networking sites to scan your email account to look for your friends and send spam mails to them without your consent or knowledge.
- Use Strong Passwords.
- Do not announce your vacations, travel plans etc. on social media. Criminals can use it as an opportunity for theft etc.
- When chatting with someone online and you feel suspicious about your chat partner, try asking some unrelated scientific or mathematical questions. If it does not answer or acknowledge the question, it may mean that you are chatting with an automated computer bot.
- Do not use public computer/ cyber cafe to access social networking websites, it may be may be infected/ installed with a key logger application which will capture your keystrokes including the login credentials.
- Do not share or forward unverified posts/ news on social media forums. These may contain fake news or contain sensitive information which may mislead people.
- Many social networking sites prompt you to download third-party applications that lets you access more pages. Do not download unverified third-party applications without doing research about its safety.
- Do not hesitate to report, if someone is posting offensive and abusive content on social media.
- Do not download third-party applications
- Do report, if some one post offensive content
- Do not share or forward unverified posts/ news
- Do not share your sensitive personal photographs and videos on social media.
- Do not accept friend requests from strangers on social networking sites.
- Do not trust online users unless you know and can trust them in real life.
- Do not share your personal information such as address, phone number, date of birth etc. on social media. Identity thieves can easily access and use this information.
Report on Government Cyber Crime Portal
National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal is an initiative of Government of India to facilitate victims/complainants to report all types of cybercrime complaints online.Complaints reported National Cyber Crime Reporting
Portal are dealt by respective police authorities of States/ UTs based on the information provided by the complainants. If you want to report something other than Cybercrime cases or in case of an emergency please contact your local police by dialing 100.
Visit official website of National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal :
Read Guidelines issued by Ministry of Home Affairs of India