I was going to type up a how-to guide for securing your accounts and making it harder for TRAs to hijack your social media accounts and "out" you. However, Noah Kelley over at Hackblossom already did a great free how-to and Violet Blue also wrote a really helpful cybersecurity book dealing with the threat models that women face that you can get on Kindle or in paperback for under a tenner. Just carrying out Blue's "Nine Privacy Tips To Use Right Now" along with adding two-factor authentication for any accounts you have that support it and using a password manager instead of reusing your password across sites, will make it so much more difficult for the TRAs to get you.
What I will discuss briefly are some things not discussed in either Kelley's guide or Blue's book:
- When you email someone, or post on a private forum, or text someone, you lose the power to secure your words. Even if you trust that the email recipient or other forum users won't intentionally leak your words, if their email box is broken into or their forum account is hijacked, your words are vulnerable. In short, the emails you send are only as secure as the recipient's password.
- If you email a lot of people at once, put their email addresses in the BCC field, not the To field. Put your own email address in the To field. The email addresses in the BCC field can't be seen by the recipients. If you have any moles on your list, using the BCC field protect the genuine people from having their email address outed to the mole.