New Year online account clean ups

Every year I make resolutions and do my house cleaning.  One of the ritual I do is to review all my online accounts and update my settings, change passwords, etc.

1.  I update settings to increase my privacy as much as possible.  By default, for social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ etc.  I set my sharing settings to only my circle, unless I specifically say otherwise.

2. I also change my privacy settings to not allow anyone to see more about me than I am comfortable with.

3. I turn on Two Factor Authentication if it is offer.  This mean that login to an online account requires both password and something extra, such as a code sent to my phone via SMS.  This has saved my bacons a few times when some rather big web sites (whose name shall not be mention) users database got hacked.

4. I also change my password if I’ve used that password for a while on that particular account.  Yes, I know about having to keep track of, remember, all these different passwords.  That’s why I strongly recommend a password locker.  There are apps that run on iOS, Android, Windows and OS X (across all of them too), that you can use keep your passwords in.

5. I use a password generator to generate my 8 to 12 chars password (8 is the minimum I recommend).