Profile Privacy Best Practices

Your Profile Is Your Public Face

On any social media platform, your profile is the primary source of information about you. It is the first thing someone sees when they visit your page, and depending on your settings, it may be visible to everyone on the platform, or even indexed by search engines. Taking a few minutes to review what your profile reveals, and to whom, is one of the most effective privacy measures you can take.

What to Show and What to Hide

KF.Social allows you to control which profile fields are visible to the public, to friends only, or to no one but you. Consider each field carefully:

• Full name: Using your real name makes it easier for friends to find you, but it also makes it easier for strangers to look you up on other platforms, in public records, or through data brokers.
• Date of birth: Your full date of birth is a key piece of information for identity verification. If you choose to display it, consider showing only the day and month, or hiding it entirely.
• Location: Listing your city or town can be useful for local discovery, but avoid displaying your specific neighbourhood or postcode.
• Workplace and education: These details narrow down your identity significantly. If you include them, restrict their visibility to friends only.

Email and Phone Number in Your Bio

Some users add their email address or phone number to their profile bio for convenience, expecting friends or business contacts to reach them easily. This is risky for several reasons. Publicly visible email addresses are harvested by spammers and used in targeted phishing attacks. Phone numbers can be used for SIM-swapping fraud, where an attacker convinces your mobile provider to transfer your number to a new SIM card, giving them access to your accounts that use SMS-based two-factor authentication. On KF.Social, there is no need to put your email or phone number in your bio. Friends can contact you through the platform's messaging feature, and your contact details are stored securely in your account settings where they are not publicly visible.

Profile Photo Considerations

Your profile photo is almost always publicly visible, even to people who are not logged in. Consider the following before choosing one:

• A clear photo of your face can be used in a reverse image search to find your other social media profiles, news articles, or professional listings.
• Photos taken at recognisable locations (your front door, a workplace entrance, a school) can inadvertently reveal where you live or work.
• If you are concerned about impersonation, watermarking your profile photo can make it harder for someone to reuse your image convincingly on a fake profile.

Username Consistency Risks

Using the same username across multiple platforms makes it convenient to maintain a consistent online identity. It also makes it trivially easy for automated scraping tools to link your accounts together. A scraper that finds your KF.Social username can search for the same handle on other platforms and aggregate information from all of them, building a comprehensive profile that no single platform would reveal on its own. Consider using different usernames for platforms where you want to maintain separation between your identities, particularly between personal and professional accounts.

KF.Social Privacy Settings Walkthrough

To review and adjust your profile privacy on KF.Social, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Settings > Privacy from the main menu.
2. Under Profile Visibility, choose whether your profile is visible to Everyone, Friends Only, or Friends of Friends.
3. Under Profile Fields, set the visibility for each individual field: name, date of birth, location, workplace, education, and relationship status.
4. Under Search & Discovery, choose whether your profile can be found via search engines, email address lookup, or phone number lookup. Disabling these options reduces your discoverability to strangers.
5. Under Contact, ensure your email and phone number visibility is set to "Only Me."

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) recommends reviewing privacy settings on all platforms regularly, especially after updates that may reset your preferences. Get Safe Online also provides platform-by-platform advice on configuring profile settings for maximum privacy without sacrificing usability.