Should you delete your old social and email accounts?
By Camille Brandon and Kate Parsons
In a world where nearly every click leaves a trace, is your online presence a liability or an asset? Having a sizeable digital footprint is almost inescapable today. This is especially true for Millennials and Gen Zers who have grown up documenting their lives online (and often have a raft of unused social media accounts, embarrassing email addresses and old blogs to show for it).
Contact talked to UQ Cyber expert Professor Ryan Ko to find out whether we should be cleaning up our act to protect future job prospects and safeguard ourselves from the millions of daily hacking incidents.
Professor Ryan Ko
Chair and Director of UQ Cyber Research Centre
What's at stake?
The most common risk to your personal security is your information being scraped to allow a cybercriminal to profile you and then target you for phishing or scams. Your information can be used to break into the authentication surveys that verify you, so it may lead to identity theft as well.
The information you share online also poses a risk to your professional reputation. Human resource companies nowadays can use services that summarise your digital footprint – your likes, shares and reposts – to create a profile about you. These online actions can indicate political preferences or support for certain causes that may not reflect who you really are. It could be a simple ‘like’ that you shared 10 years ago, but it may affect you for years to come.
Image: Pexels / SLAYTINA
Image: Pexels / SLAYTINA
How to protect your professional image
Social media
There's no foolproof way to protect your professional image, but I suggest deleting your old profiles and starting new ones. If you're really interested in being active on social media, consider using a pseudonym that doesn't trace back to your real name. But ultimately, it can still be attributed to you because of your face and other factors.
With LinkedIn, it’s best to avoid revealing personal details because cybercriminals are increasingly creating fake profiles. You may not think you’re a target, but you could be used as leverage if you’re the friend or associate of a person that someone is targeting. Some people upload personal information or share pictures of their children or their spouse – this is unwise. In the age of falsified information, it’s best to be extra careful as AI can be used to steal your identity.
Just remember, even if you lock your accounts and set them to private, it’s only effective to some extent. Doing this reduces the scope of who can see your content, but it doesn’t mean the people who can see it wouldn’t misuse that information.
Emails
Start by deactivating old email accounts and requesting the archives of your emails in those accounts. Another thing you can do is enable two-factor authentication in your active accounts, which adds another level of security against data breaches if the passwords are leaked.
Avoid sharing your email in online forms, too. There are services like DuckDuckGo that allow you to create a forwarding email to use for things like subscribing to mailing lists. This screens for privacy or personal information trackers and creates another layer of protection to prevent your personal email from being shared in future data breaches.
Sharing professional content online
The best things to post online to boost your professional profile are the cool things that you have achieved or done, like sharing a report or a book you wrote, or the projects that you have completed. However, avoid sharing your location when posting about events like conferences. It's best practice to avoid posting about the conference until the day or week after to prevent people from looking into your exact location.
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