COVERT Protocol Action #5: Audit Your Social Media Accounts

0:00Welcome back to the Opset podcast. I am your host Alan Pace and today we are covering covert protocol action number five which is audit your social media accounts. In order to accomplish this you'll want to create a list of all of your social media accounts that you use and which platforms that you are active on and systematically log into each one of them and review which information about you is publicly viewable and which information is private. This information should include what is visible related to photographs, the locations you're at, friends and family members and those photographs, posts that you might have made, bio data and your social media connections. Then what you will want to do is you'll want to decide which of that information you want to remove or minimize or obfuscate or redact or whatever you want to call it from the public sphere. Now listeners to this show should expect my opinion of

1:06this to be that you shouldn't be on social media at all because it's garbage which I will actually go into a little bit more in detail at the end of this episode but I believe that the bare minimum information should be visible to the public at most. Now steps to audit your social media exposure would be step one to make a full list of every social media profile or public social online account you've ever created including active and dormant accounts, mainstream platforms, smaller platforms if you are on some obscured dark web chat room you want to audit that one as well. Step two is visit each one of those accounts and carefully examine what can be seen publicly. Okay mentioned before profile pictures, bio information, name location, PII such as birth dates, contact info, posts, comments, photos, tags, friend list, all of it, and you need to decide what is important to you for you to scrub from the public view.

2:11Step three is adjust privacy and visibility settings on each account so that only trusted contacts, friends and people that you follow or people that you know can see any sensitive content at all. Delete, lock down, or hide personal details, contact information, location data, and old posts. I only personally use LinkedIn, this is the only social media platform that I use and if you go on my LinkedIn page you will see I have several things redacted on there because the world doesn't need to know the various places that I've worked in the past and they don't need to have my resume because unless I'm applying for a job you don't need my whole resume so I have systematically cleaned that up over time I still see people from the intelligence community or from the military put their clearance information in the header of their LinkedIn profile which I think is a massive offset breach and just an unwise thing to do so I would say clean up all of it and make it as

3:16generic as possible. Step four is remove or deactivate any accounts that you no longer use or that you don't want public visible. The dormant accounts can still leak personal information and they can get stolen and taken and over and then you lose control of whatever you have on that account so always a good idea to deactivate unused and old dormant accounts and step five is to set up a schedule on your personal calendar preferably you have set up a secured calendar an encrypted calendar like proton calendar something similar to that and periodically repeat the audit every three to six months by viewing the privacy settings and platform defaults to see if they've changed verify all of the your connections and tags and make sure that nothing has resurfaced on those accounts that you do not want to have visible to the public and that covers the steps for implementation for auditing your social media accounts. Today's step is a little bit of a

4:22shorter one the only tools that are suggested are your own fingers and keyboard and device that you use these social media accounts on as well as your time and determination to actually go fix these things. When I originally wrote out the list for the covert protocol actions and I decided upon this one to be action number five and and created the steps in the description for it I had one specific idea in mind which was to scrub social media information that's exposed but recently I have thought of another meaning for auditing your social media with a personal experience that I had where I had the LinkedIn app on one of my devices on on a tablet that I use and I found myself even though I am extremely paranoid and dialed into the addictive behavior of the constant

5:22scrolling as well as the lack of quality that most social media content is I still found myself doom scrolling because of the never ending scroll feature that is on the mobile app for LinkedIn so I decided that because I don't like wasting my time on social media and LinkedIn has also turned into a bunch of garbage it used to be all professional content or mostly professional content is dominated by political opinions and Alan I don't care to hear that garbage so I deleted it off my tablet I have forced myself to be able to only use LinkedIn by logging on through my browser so I wanted to bring that up because in the information eco sphere social media content is raw untreated sewage it is absolute trash and even somebody like me who is very against it can still get locked into a doom scroll session and then 20 minutes went by and I will never be

6:28able to get that time back and everything these days is pure lucky it's a person's uneducated opinion if you're unlucky it is strategic rage bait put out by a media organization that has an intention to get you upset or angry or fearful or whatever and that content is not something I want to consume and the social media and the internet environment I believe is still a free environment because you can vote with your feet and you can vote with your money and that's what I chose to do with this move which is voting with my feet I pulled that app off of my tablet and I made it harder for myself to accidentally waste time on it so in the auditing process of your social media accounts I want you to also think about that get that garbage off of your phone you don't need social media apps on your phone ever unless social media is a primary function for your business and to make money that's it well thank you for listening to my rant that I just went on for a few extra minutes

7:34there that is going to wrap up the episode for today where recovered covert action number five auditing your social media accounts and remember that your privacy and your security is your responsibility this is Alan Pace signing off