Now and then we have to review our Twitter safety – removing apps that access your account.
While we are using Twitter we gradually allow 3rd party apps access to our accounts. These are apps that have been developed by companies other that twitter, that can access your tweets and other data for various reasons. Some apps gather data, need access so that you can use their app to tweet through twitter
3rd Party Apps like …
Of course most of these we still want but sometimes others might sneak in when we are not quite aware, or we might have allowed access for one action and now we don’t need them any more.
Sometimes when people think they are hacked on Twitter its because they have allowed an account access by mistake or tricked into doing so by something that they have clicked
The result of these apps could
- Tweet unexpected tweets from your account
- Send DM’s that you have no knowledge of
- Following, unfollowing or blocking twitter users for you
- Or worse you get a notification telling your to reset your password, enabling the spammers access to your account if you do this.
The first thing you should to if you think your account has been hacked or compromised in anyway is to change your password.
- Click your profile picture
- Click settings
- Click password (on the left hand side)
- and follow the instructions there to create a new password.
Note – Never click a link in an email or message telling you to reset your password, always do it this way.
If you use something that has your password stored such as the Twitter app or Hootsuite you will have to remember to change the password there too.
Then you will need to check through your Apps on twitter and revoke access for any apps that you don’t recognize.
Removing apps that access your account
Removing apps that access your account is very simple actually, even when you don’t really know much about social media. What you need to do is Revoke access – which means to not allow it access to your account any more.
- Click your profile picture
- Click settings
- Click apps (on the left hand side)
Here you you can click Revoke Access – and if you know that this if the offending application make sure that you report it – a link will appear when you revoke access for you to do so. If you are unsure if you use that 3rd Party application then you can revoke access and when you try to use the app it will ask you to revoke assess again.
The applications are in order – the last app you added should be at the top and so on, so if you suddenly noticed a problem with your twitter account then you will probably see the offending application at the top.
We allow access to many many accounts as I’m always testing out new or different apps – and we often just leave them with access, so its good to go through the list now and then and just to clean up the apps that you have allowed access to your twitter account.
So we hope now that you are able and know why you should be removing apps that access your account on Twitter
