The Social Media Privacy Problem
TL;DR: Social platforms profit by collecting and monetising your data, tracking far more than what you post. You can claw back control by tightening each platform's privacy settings, sharing less, locking accounts down with strong passwords and 2FA, and using a VPN to hide your location and stop your ISP from seeing which platforms you use.
Social media platforms make money by collecting and monetising your data. Every like, share, scroll, and pause is tracked and analysed to build a profile that can be sold to advertisers. The product being sold is your attention and your behaviour, which is why these services are free to use; understanding that business model is the first step to protecting yourself within it.
The tracking also reaches well beyond the apps themselves. Through embedded buttons, pixels, and software development kits baked into other websites and apps, platforms can follow much of what you do even when you are not actively using them. Reining this in is mostly a matter of changing default settings that were chosen to favour data collection, not your privacy.
What Social Media Tracks
- Your location history and frequently visited places
- Your contacts and relationship graph
- Your interests, opinions, and preferences
- Your purchasing behaviour and the ads you respond to
- Your device information and how you use it
- Your browsing activity on other sites and apps that carry the platform's tracking code
Privacy Tips for Major Platforms
Facebook/Meta
- Review your privacy settings at least quarterly, as defaults change
- Limit ad personalisation and clear your off-platform activity history
- Turn off facial recognition where the option exists
- Disable location history
- Restrict which apps and sites can access your account
- Set your account to private so only approved followers see your posts
- Disable activity status so others cannot see when you are online
- Review your tagged-photo and mention settings
- Limit data sharing with advertising partners
TikTok
- Review and clear your watch history
- Disable personalised ads
- Limit who can view, comment on, and download your content
Twitter/X
- Disable location tagging on posts
- Turn off personalisation based on your activity elsewhere
- Review and revoke connected apps regularly
- Restrict who can see your connections and activity
- Turn off the setting that broadcasts profile changes
- Limit how your data is used for advertising and research
How VPNs Help with Social Media Privacy
Mask Your Location
With a VPN, platforms see the server's IP rather than yours, so they cannot use your address to pinpoint where you are or refine location-based targeting.
Prevent ISP Tracking
Your ISP cannot see which platforms you use or how long you spend on them, because the connection is encrypted inside the VPN tunnel.
Secure Public Access
A VPN lets you log into social accounts safely on public WiFi, where session cookies and credentials would otherwise be exposed to interception.
The Hidden Risk of Oversharing
Settings protect you from the platforms, but they cannot protect you from yourself. The details you choose to post are often the richest source of risk. A photo with location data, a story about being on holiday, a child's school in the background, a new car's number plate, all of these can be assembled by strangers into a surprisingly complete picture. Burglars have used holiday posts to time break-ins, and social engineers mine birthdays, pet names, and family details to answer security questions and reset passwords. Before you share, it is worth pausing to ask who could see this and what they could do with it. Posting after you return from a trip rather than during it, and keeping identifying details out of frame, costs nothing and removes a whole category of risk.
Watch Out for Third-Party Apps and Quizzes
Those fun personality quizzes and "log in with your social account" buttons are a major, often overlooked leak. When you authorise a third-party app, you frequently grant it access to your profile, friends list, and activity, and that access persists long after you have forgotten the app exists. Some of these apps are built specifically to harvest data. Review your connected apps periodically and revoke anything you no longer use or do not recognise. As a rule, treat every "connect with" prompt as a privacy decision, not a convenience, and create a separate account where you can rather than linking your main identity.
Complete Privacy Checklist
1. Use a VPN when accessing social media, especially on shared networks
2. Review each platform's privacy settings monthly
3. Limit the personal information you share publicly, including location and routines
4. Use strong, unique passwords managed by a password manager
5. Enable two-factor authentication on every account
6. Be selective about third-party apps and revoke ones you no longer use
7. Regularly review and remove old posts that reveal more than you want today
8. Avoid posting real-time location and wait until you are home to share travel
9. Decline "log in with social" prompts where a separate account will do
You do not have to quit social media to protect your privacy, and you do not have to overhaul everything in one sitting. Start with the highest-impact moves: set your accounts to private, enable two-factor authentication, revoke connected apps you no longer use, and turn on automatic VPN connection. Then return every month or so to review settings, prune old posts, and check what new data-sharing options the platforms have quietly added. Privacy on social media is not all-or-nothing. Each setting you tighten and each detail you withhold meaningfully shrinks the profile being built about you, and the combination of careful settings, mindful sharing, and a VPN gives you back a real measure of control without giving up the connections you value. The platforms will always nudge you toward sharing more and revealing more, because that is how they make money. Pushing back a little, with private accounts, fewer connected apps, mindful posting, and an encrypted connection, is how you keep the parts of your life that should stay yours from becoming part of someone else's data set. Protect your social media activity with GLOBEX.
