--- title: "Time to clean up your social logins" url: "https://www.bekk.christmas/post/2018/18/time-to-clean-up-your-social-logins" authors: ["Lars-Erik Wollan"] published: "2018-12-18" updated: "2024-11-07T13:05:28Z" language: "en-US" type: "article" tags: ["Sikkerhet"] --- # Time to clean up your social logins As the end of the year closes in, there are no shortage of tips on how to get your home ready for the festive season. We think you should take a time out, and consider which application should still have access to your social accounts. ## In short Social logins make it easy for third-party apps and websites to authenticate through accounts like Facebook, Google, and Twitter, but they also leave behind access that may no longer be needed. Checking and removing old connected apps from your social accounts reduces the number of services that can access your personal information and helps keep your attack surface smaller. - **For:** Anyone using social logins on Facebook, Google, or Twitter _AI-generated_ Proving who we are on the internet is not an easy task and giving away more or less personal information to random websites just to be able to test the latest social network of the day or be able to comment on someone’s blog post was for some time a bothersome process where one had to create accounts for all the different services. This issue was solved by several major companies, predominantly social networks, where most of use already had registered already. # The social login Services as “Login with Facebook”, “Google Sign-In” with more, provide third parties a frictionless way to authenticate users on their site without requiring their users to create a new account on their site. In return the selected login provider receives more information on which sites you visit and an probably sell your more native content or advertisements. This can be a fair trade, the third party can authenticate the user, the user can use the service without creating a new account. # Reduce attack surface For the purpose of this posting, we will not go in to the technical implementation nor the privacy implications, but we think that reducing your attack surface will improve your security and privacy online. We suggest you login to your various social networks and see if you have given access to your personal information to any service or application your do not use. We have found that doing it a yearly task, we are able to keep the number of services that have access to our Google account or Facebook profile to a bare minimum. # A few examples ## Facebook Go to the _Apps and Websites_ tab under _Settings_ in Facebook. There you can see which applications and websites can access some of your Facebook profile, or in some cases, your friends profiles. [https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications§ion=removed](https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications§ion=removed) ## Google Login to your Google account and go the Google Account. Under Sign-in & security a link which open a list of connected applications can be found. [https://myaccount.google.com/security#connectedapps](https://myaccount.google.com/security#connectedapps) ## Twitter The Twitter web page let your access which applications are connected to your account. [https://twitter.com/settings/sessions](https://twitter.com/settings/sessions) # Closing thoughts We for sure had forgotten all about several of the application we had given access to our Twitter account back in 2015. So, let 2019 begin with a clean start. ## Relevant resources recommended by the author - [Social login on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_login)