With the prevalent use of the internet nowadays, protecting our privacy needs to be at the forefront of our minds every time we go online. With all of the risks taken every day by utilizing the internet without following methods to ensure security, then millions of people put themselves at risk on a daily basis.
There are countless ways to mitigate risk when going online and everyone should be following these simple methods all of the time in order to protect themselves, their identity, and to give themselves financial security.
Protect Your Privacy
With all of the data breaches that occur, even with big industries and businesses, then we must take all of the possible precautions in order to make sure that we are as protected as we can be. Listed here are several tools for how to keep your privacy protected and to increase your level of security at the same time:
Social Media
Your first step to safeguarding your privacy is to check your social media. A lot of people don’t have privacy settings turned on with any of their social media accounts. This is something that you want to keep private from the greater public as it can reveal a lot about you and can make you more vulnerable to having your identity stolen. Going into each of your social media accounts and changing your settings to private or to ‘visible to friends’ will greatly reduce your risk of online fraud.
Watch What You Store Online
You will also want to be careful as to which online storage sites that you use online and what you store there. This can include anything from Dropbox to Google docs and photos. If you store any information such as passwords or your social security information, then you need to make sure that it is encrypted first and foremost. However, it is highly advised against storing any type of personal data online data storage platforms as they are more vulnerable to being hacked.
Avoid Tracking
Tracking can occur whenever you visit a website! Whenever you visit a website, then the browser that you use will share that information with marketers in order to give you very specific and targeted ads that are using your browser search history as well as the websites that you visit. In order to prevent this sharing of information about you, then you need to enlist a variety of special tools to help you out. You can use private browsing tools in order to stop this tracking.
Don’t Use Your Primary Email Account
Everything we do online seems to want to have access to our email addresses and our phone numbers. If you have an alternate email address or can create one in order to give to websites in order to get that special discount or promotion, then you should start using that for any and all online purchases and promotions. This will greatly reduce your risk of spam emails and robocalls to your primary email and phone number.
Encrypt Your Messages
When using many of the popular messaging apps, most of the time, these messages aren’t encrypted. That makes all of your conversations vulnerable to hacking and identity theft. This also means that all of your messages are vulnerable in the event of malware or hacking in the server of the actual app itself. In order to protect yourself, then you will want to only use messaging services that are end-to-end encrypted such as Whatsapp.
Use A VPN
When using public wifi, your information is always in a vulnerable state. Anything that you do online within that state can be seen or hacked. What is nordvpn or other VPN services? They are all VPN services that work to protect you against this type of online vulnerability. When you use a VPN and have it on while browsing online on public wifi, then you will stay protected. Make sure to use a secure VPN and to have it on at all times in order to give your data the protection that it needs.
With all of the ways to protect your privacy while increasing your security nowadays online, then you can rest easy at night knowing that your information is safe. Taking these extra precautions will greatly reduce your risk of security risks and identity theft. The more that you can lower risks, then the safer your information will be. Going online doesn’t need to be scary but we all need to be more aware of the information that we are putting out there for everyone to see.
