Is someone spying on your Facebook account? This is how to check

This is how to make sure your Facebook isn’t being monitored by someone else, whether that’s by an ex-partner or a stranger.

How to check

A university study in Canada found 24 per cent of the subjects who took part had accessed someone else’s Facebook account without permission.

If you’re worried that someone else might be logged into your account, this is how you can check on Facebook:

• On either your smartphone or your computer, go to your Facebook settings
• Select security and login
• From there you’ll be able to see where you’re logged in, include device and its location, as well as showing which devices are ‘active now’ - you’ll also be able to see a history of all logins
• If you see a device you don’t recognise or trust (it will say ‘Samsung 10’ or ‘MacBook Pro’, for example), then click on it and you’ll be able to log out of it
• You also have the option to log out of all the devices that are logged in

Keep your social media safe

As well as making sure no one else is logged into your online profiles, you should make sure your password is secure to make sure nobody can guess it.

This is the advice that Google has for creating a strong password:

• Create a password using eight characters or more, utilising character capitalisation, numbers and some special characters
• Avoid any personal info like the name of your pet or your birth date
• Don’t use common words or patterns like ‘abcd’ or ‘1234’

Alternatively, if you don’t want to make your own password, Google can always generate a complicated, and therefore highly secure, password for you instead.

As well as making sure your password is strong, you should also turn on two-factor authentication. Two-factor authentication means that if someone tries to log into your account from a new device or browser, Facebook will ask for a verification code that will be sent to your smartphone.

Without this code, the person won’t be able to log into your account.