Why you should never log in to other sites with Facebook (and how to do it safely)

Endless apps and services let you log in with your Facebook account for convenience. This ensures that not only Facebook knows more and more about you, but also potential hackers. This is why you should never log into other sites with Facebook.

Why logging in with Facebook is never a good idea

The scandals surrounding Facebook have recently been piling up again to great heights. A marketing scandal came out recently. The phone number you use to make your Facebook account more secure is shared by the social network with advertisers.

Just a few days later, malicious parties hacked Facebook and gained access to a whopping 50 million user accounts. A large proportion of these users have undoubtedly used their Facebook account to log in to other sites and services. This saves you the time of creating a new account, but gives Facebook access to even more data.

Facebook advertisers

And more importantly, hackers also have that during such a large-scale hack. This not only gives them access to your Facebook data, but all your data from Airbnb, Spotify, Expedia and Tinder, for example, is also on the street. What does it matter? A lot. Certainly services to which you have linked payment data, for example, make that hackers can steal and misuse valuable information.

Working hard on a solution

Guy Rosen, Facebook vice president, posted a last Tuesday statement in which he states that there is no evidence that hackers have also passed through other sites via the security hole. The company is ‘working on more advanced ways to have linked services investigate themselves’ after a leak.

While there is no evidence that personal information from linked services is at risk, there is no evidence to rule this out. That is precisely why it is important to always be cautious about linking services and other sites. Facebook is the largest social network in the world, and therefore a beloved and precious target.

We are therefore working hard to make Facebook more secure, but in the meantime such security leaks prove that the time has come. Until then, it is better not to put all your online data in the hands of Mark Zuckerberg’s company alone.

How do I log in quickly and securely without Facebook?

Logging in with your Facebook account saves a lot of time and passwords to remember. Those are probably the main reasons it is being done en masse. But how else do you log in quickly and easily everywhere? There is a way that is just as simple and also a lot safer: a password manager.

password app

A password app or extension that stores all your passwords securely so you never forget them. Such a manager also generates strong passwords with letters, numbers and characters. When you sync it with all your devices, you log in just as quickly as with your Facebook account.

With such a safe, you never have to invent passwords yourself again, with the chance that they turn out to be too weak or you will reuse them. And if you are still a victim of a hack, the damage remains as limited as possible.

Also read: The 4 best password apps to secure your online profiles

To see which apps or services are currently linked, go to ‘Settings> Apps and websites’ in Facebook. Here you can edit and delete links. With some services, you will not lose your account when you delete the Facebook link. If that is the case, it is safer to create a new account with the service itself.

Monthly Theme Security

In October, we will consider the theme of Security. In the coming weeks we will help you to better secure your Apple devices and online accounts. Using tips and background, we explain step by step how to handle your data more consciously and how to protect your data better.

Be sure to let us know which topic we cannot ignore during this monthly theme. This can be done via a comment under this article or an email to redactie@iphoned.nl.

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