The internet can often be a pretty dangerous place, and one of the biggest reasons why it might not be as safe a place as you would like is because of the fact that numerous malicious actors would potentially want to gain illicit and illegal access to your accounts or devices, and they often do so by attempting to hack in to your social media accounts first and foremost.
In order to prevent malicious actors from having this much influence over your online life, social media platforms rolled out two factor authentication. This means that for the most part, you would need to put in your password in order to access your account and subsequently a code that you would receive on your phone number via text message. Hence, if someone wanted to access your account and they had your password they would not be able to do so because of the fact that they wouldn’t have access to your phone.
However, a lot of people feel like this is adding safety at the expense of privacy. Many people don’t want to give social media platforms this much information, and for good reasons since social media platforms have been notorious for using any and all methods to acquire large amounts of data from users so that they can profit off of this data.
The good news is that Twitter is now rolling out a new form of two-factor authentication, one that would not require you to put your phone number in. This is particularly important when you consider that SMS based authentication is not as safe as you might initially think because of the fact that hackers using sim swappers managed to access the account of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey himself, thereby making it clear that more effort needed to be put in in order to ensure user safety and privacy.
Photo: REUTERS/Mike Blake
Read next: Twitter Will Now Send Push Notifications for Suspicious Logins
In order to prevent malicious actors from having this much influence over your online life, social media platforms rolled out two factor authentication. This means that for the most part, you would need to put in your password in order to access your account and subsequently a code that you would receive on your phone number via text message. Hence, if someone wanted to access your account and they had your password they would not be able to do so because of the fact that they wouldn’t have access to your phone.
However, a lot of people feel like this is adding safety at the expense of privacy. Many people don’t want to give social media platforms this much information, and for good reasons since social media platforms have been notorious for using any and all methods to acquire large amounts of data from users so that they can profit off of this data.
The good news is that Twitter is now rolling out a new form of two-factor authentication, one that would not require you to put your phone number in. This is particularly important when you consider that SMS based authentication is not as safe as you might initially think because of the fact that hackers using sim swappers managed to access the account of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey himself, thereby making it clear that more effort needed to be put in in order to ensure user safety and privacy.
Photo: REUTERS/Mike Blake
Read next: Twitter Will Now Send Push Notifications for Suspicious Logins
