January 27th is Data Privacy Day!
The internet has opened so many doors for us and truly is a part of our day to day lives. We don't often take the time to think about the fact that we put a lot of our personal information out there. On Data Privacy Day we are reminded that we need to be vigilant in taking care of our precious personal data and making sure it is protected.
Some Simple Tips for Protecting Your Data:
1. Check your privacy settings. Most of your social and eCommerce accounts will have a place where you can view and change your privacy settings. Every couple weeks you should review your privacy settings and make sure that it is set to what you want. You should consider the personal data that you are willing to make public (ie: email, phone number, birthday, location).
2. Don't use a public service to store any private data. Google Docs is a great tool and very helpful for students and businesses alike that need a central place to store their work. However, you should not store personal information such as passwords or other sensitive data on a public service.
3. Use private browsing. Using a private browsing window like a Incognito window, is very helpful for deterring internet tracking. Normally when you open a browser, it stores the websites you visit, the items you search for, or anything you might have bought. This information can be given to marketers. When you use a private browsing setting, this information is not stored.
4. Use strong passwords. When you create a password is should not have any personal info like your name or birthday. It is also strongly advised that you create a long password, 12 characters (letters, numbers, and symbols) long. Additionally creating unique passwords for each of your services is strongly advised. While it may seem convenient to have the same password for everything, it puts you at a larger risk and makes it easier for potential malicious users to access your accounts.
5. Use passwords and passcodes for access to your electronic devices. Make sure you are protecting the device or devices you have that store all your precious information! A simple passcode or password being enabled on a device can go a long way in protecting your data.
6. Use secure WiFi. A secure WiFi connection is very important. Public WiFis do not always have data encryption and this means that anyone that has access to the WiFi can track your browsing information. Try and keep login and monetary transactions to a minimum on public WiFi to avoid your passwords and credit card data getting into the wrong hands.
Information partially taken from: https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/privacy-ten-tips-2018/23022/.