Cyber security, anti-bullying feature: Experts happy with Instagram's new updates

Facebook has a dedicated section for privacy settings and tools (accessible in the Settings menu). In this section, you can choose who can see your future activity. For privacy, select Friends instead of Public. Also on the same page, you get the option to limit accessibility of your existing posts on the social network to only friends instead of everyone. You can also choose individual settings for items such as friend requests, email addresses access, phone number access and who can see your friends list. To step up your privacy, switch all these settings to ‘Friends Only’. We also recommend switching off access to search engines outside of Facebook.

By default, all the information in your profile is in the public domain. To change this, click on your profile picture on the top bar to view your profile. On this page, you can view all the information available to anyone who opens your profile page. Click the edit button (the small pencil icon) that appears inside the intro box and you can then customize your info. We recommend switching off all the items you want to keep private from prying eyes.

Many regular Facebook users tend to upload a lot of photos to share with friends and family. However, you don’t want everyone who visits your profile to have access to all these memories either. One way to hide them is to delete them from Facebook after a few months. The other way is to edit the privacy settings for each photo album. Click on Photos > Albums. For any album that you want to limit access to, click the options button (the three dots on the right corner) on an individual album and choose edit. This will open the privacy settings for the album for which you can select only friends, family or only you.

Quite like Instagram, Twitter lets you hide your tweets from the world — this means they’ll only be visible to your existing followers and won’t show up in searches. You will also have to individually approve new followers from that point forward. To do this, go to the ‘Settings and Privacy’ section and look for ‘Privacy and Safety’. Here, you can switch-on the feature marked ‘Protect your Tweets’.

One of the nicest privacy features on Twitter is that it lets you control how people can look you up on Twitter. In Settings, look for a section on Discoverability — here you can choose if other users can find you on Twitter using your email address or phone number. You can also view and manage any contacts you have uploaded to Twitter from your smartphone or choose to remove uploaded data from your account altogether.

This is the easiest method to prevent access to your Instagram posts and stories. In the Instagram app on your phone, open settings > Privacy and Security. You will see the option for Account Privacy here which gives you the option to switch to a private account. Once enabled, only people that are following you will be able to see your posts. Any new followers will have to be approved by you individually. You should do this if you’re not interested in growing your followers and want to share with a group of people only.

Chances are that you have linked your Facebook profile to your Instagram account — either by choice or by using a Facebook account to login to Instagram. What happens in this scenario is that when anyone visits your Facebook profile, it shows them that you are also available on Instagram. To avoid this, head to Settings in your Instagram app, tap on Account > Linked Accounts > Facebook and select ‘Unlink Account’.

Even with your account set to private, a friend can share your story to their timeline and it would then become public through their feed. To stop this from happening, you can control how your Instagram stories can be seen and shared. In Settings, go to Privacy and Security > Story Controls. Here, you can switch off the option that lets people share your story. You can create a blacklist to hide your story from certain people, choose who can reply to your story (everyone, people you follow or no one) and there are also options to prevent saving story posts to the Instagram archive.