When the internet was first designed, it was rightfully hailed as the miracle that it is and it has since completely changed the world that we live in. There is however, as with any successful innovation, some downsides to what the internet can offer. In this case, the internet is relatively unpoliced and there is a great deal of your information which is swirling around in cyberspace, up for grabs to the best hacker.
It is for these reasons that data protection should be high in your mind when you are online and there are many steps which you should be taking to ensure that your personal information is secure.
The best approach when it comes to your email accounts is to assume that all free accounts on offer such as Gmail, are highly susceptible to information theft and that a paid for service is the best course of action. Free email accounts are extremely easy to hack, as you may know if you have ever been in the situation where all of your contacts receive suspicious emails. Your email accounts feature a great amount of private information and if you want to stay secure, this is a great place to start.
Browsing privacy and security is very important given that it is the activity which you are most likely to be doing online. To begin with, the history of websites which you have visited, and the saved details such as logins and passwords, are essentially public property and you should take steps such as deletion of history and temporary data, as well as saved passwords being deleted for your own security. If you really want to secure your browsing data then why not try a browser such as Tor which is freely available and will encrypt your entire browsing activities.
The amount of information which you can extract from someone’s social media page is quite worrying when you consider this from a security point of view. If you want to use social media, the best way of doing so is with completely false information about your date of birth and the things that you like. If you want to ensure that you are doing all that you can to protect your data then social media should be high up on your list of priorities.
Try to avoid using websites such as FourSquare which tell the world exactly where you are. Just think about it like this, a savvy hacker and thief has chosen you, found out the kind of stuff that you are into and decided to steal from your home. What better time for a thief to attack, than to choose the exact moment that you check in, 10 miles away from home in a restaurant with your family, you may as well send them an invite to your home as it is empty.