Securing oneself on Snapchat

People care about saving their snap scores a lot these days. However, it is equally important to save oneself on Snapchat as well. Snapchat has some great privacy and security features right from the installation, such as identifying the person who took the screenshot of a story or snaps only being visible to friends. While it is advised to keep these feature enables as it is, this blog will highlight some other key aspects in protecting One’s Security and Privacy on Snapchat.

1. Securing the safety of an individual’s personal information

Keeping one’s Snapchat account safe from malicious attempts of social engineering is extremely important, as a large user base of the application is primarily very young and vulnerable. A key security feature, which everyone should enable, is Two-factor Authentication. Follow the following steps to enable it and be safe, protected and aware of any malicious attempts of access of one’s Snapchat account

1. Go to your profile -> Go to “Settings” -> Click on “Two-factor Authentication”
2. Press “continue” -> Press “Text Verification”
3. Enter the 6-digit code sent on the device.
4. One can also create a ‘recovery code’ by following the next screen and entering their password. This will be useful if their phone ever gets lost and they need to recover the account.

2. Protecting one’s Location Information

Snapchat collects a user’s location and presents it on a map called Snap Map. A user can see where their friends are on this map. If one wants to protect this information one can follow the following steps.

1. Go to your profile -> Go to “Settings” -> Go to “See my Location”
2. Select the people with whom one wants to share or hide the location info.
3. One can also enable “Ghost Mode”, to hide the location info from your friends.

3. Disable “Quick Add”

This feature essentially enables one to hide oneself from the “Quick Add” column, which is visible to all of their friends of friends and people in the contact list. It protects one from random individuals who attempt to add them. Follow these steps to enable it.

1. Go to your profile -> Go to “Settings” -> Go to “See me in Quick Add”
2. Disable the feature by unchecking the tick mark.

It is also advised that an individual doesn’t give permissions to the third-party applications and share their Snapcodes openly on Snapchat or other Social media platforms.