How to Protect Your X Account and Personal Information

You can reduce most account and privacy risks on X by doing three things: switch on the security settings X provides, understand who can see your Posts, and know the recovery steps before something goes wrong. The X Help Center groups this material under Safety and security, with articles on protecting your personal information, public vs. protected Posts, information sharing with business partners, and help for a compromised account. The steps below follow those topics; exact menu labels can change, so treat the Help Center articles as the source of truth if a screen looks different.

Start with the account security basics

• Use a strong, unique password. Reusing a password from another site is the most common way accounts get taken over.
• Add your phone number to your account. The Help Center covers this under Managing your account ("How to add your phone number to your account"). A confirmed phone number gives you a recovery path if you lose access to your email.
• Keep your email address current. If your email is outdated, password resets and security notices go nowhere. See "How to update your email address."
• Review connected apps and sessions periodically and remove anything you don't recognize.

Understand public vs. protected Posts

This is the single setting that most changes who can see what you share.

If your goal is to limit your footprint, protecting your Posts is the biggest lever. If you want reach — for a brand, a creator account, or public conversation — you stay public and manage privacy through what you choose to post instead.

What to do if your account is compromised

The Help Center has a dedicated article, "Help with my compromised account." The general sequence is:

1. Try to regain access using the password reset flow, starting from the email or phone number associated with the account.
2. Change your password immediately once you're back in, and change it anywhere else you reused it.
3. Revoke suspicious sessions and connected apps so the intruder loses their foothold.
4. Check your account settings — email, phone number, and any linked accounts — for changes you didn't make.
5. Report the compromise through the Help Center if you can't get back in, since a locked or suspended account has its own support path ("Help with locked or limited account," "About suspended accounts").

If you're locked out entirely, the locked/limited account article is the correct starting point rather than the compromised-account one.

Know what X shares with business partners

The Help Center notes that additional information may be shared with business partners, and there's a separate article on how cookies are used on X. If you want to limit this kind of sharing, look at your privacy and ad personalization settings rather than assuming your data stays entirely inside X. The Help Center article is the authoritative description of what's shared and why.

Where to go for each problem

The Help Center's front page ("What can we help you find?") links directly into each of these sections, so you can jump straight to the article that matches your situation instead of searching.