Protecting Your Personal Information in the Digital Age
Whether adding to your shopping cart from your laptop in a café, doom-scrolling social media on the bus ride home from the office, or engaging in work remotely, our online presences make us more vulnerable to invasions of our privacy. So, how can we protect ourselves from risks to our personal information in an era where everything is online?
Stay up to date.
Start with something so simple, you can literally do it in your sleep. The conscious decision to maintain current updates on your devices requires minimal effort but has significant impact. By ensuring your software and apps are up to date, you ensure critical security measures are in place.
Back it up.
Also, while you are sleeping, why not back up your data? With a few keystrokes or screen swipes, you can configure your most beloved fur-baby photos (or your critical work files) to automatically save in a cloud-based storage system or external hard drive and mitigate heart-wrenching (and potentially professionally precarious) digital losses.
Beware of virtual snares.
Phishing scams are everywhere these days, with cybercriminals posing as anything from your utility company to your bank. Take a course on how to recognize phishing scams so that you can easily spot a digital intruder. For more information about phishing, read our blog post A Near Attack or view our Security and Phishing Presentation.
Be wise about your Wi-Fi.
Most free public Wi-Fi networks have minimal security measures in place. This means others using the same network could easily access your activity. Delay any secure online purchases, especially, until you are on a secure, password protected network.
Create passwords that are hard to crack.
Speaking of passwords, make sure yours (yes, plural – as in more than one) is not easily deciphered by a cybercriminal. Employ a combination of lower and uppercase letters, numbers and symbols. Some even swear by splicing together three random words to stump would-be hackers.
Do the two-step.
Two-step verification is valuable in safeguarding your accounts. Two-step verification refers to a process whereby the program you are accessing authenticates that the access request is truly from you. For example, after entering your username and password into your e-mail program on your work computer, an authentication server sends a distinct code to a secondary device, such as your cell phone. You then are prompted in your e-mail to enter the distinct code sent by that authentication server, thereby confirming your identity, and granting you access. This process ensures that, even if a password is compromised, a digital intruder cannot access an account without approval. Without authorization at that second step, a compromised password alone is useless.
While there are many ways to ensure that your private information stays truly private, starting with these six tips will launch you in a positive direction for feeling empowered about your privacy in this increasingly online world.
For more information, please see the links to our support materials below:
5 ways to protect your privacy
Influencing Sources
Government of Canada – Get Cyber Safe