By Matt Kelley (Radio Iowa)

Iowans are being warned to prune their social media friends lists and to be careful of who sees their posts about activities, especially summer vacations.

Consumer protection expert Michelle Reinen says crooks have been using AI to doctor people’s videos, crafting elaborate scams against their loved ones.

Reinen says, “What we’ve learned is it can just be as little as three seconds of your voice being cloned online.”

She suggests doing a sweep of your friends list to make sure you know everyone, and that only those friends can see your posts. Reinen says it’s not a good idea to broadcast your summer plans to the entire internet.

“If you post that you have this upcoming vacation a few weeks later, well, you’ve set yourself up to have an opportunity to have things stolen from you,” Reinen says, “because people know that you’re not in your home and they know where your home is.”

For people who have hundreds of social media friends or followers, it may be laborious to wade through the entire list, but Reinen says it’s important to do so and limit who sees your posts.

“Keep the private things private,” she says. “Not everybody needs to know everything that’s going on.”

On Facebook, for example, set the parameters on your posts to just “friends” and only on very rare occasions to “public” if you’re intentionally trying to reach a wider audience.