Sunshine #702725

Once upon a time, people were good at keeping secrets. But with the advent of the digital age, there are fewer and fewer opportunities to keep things private. Data about our daily activities – conversations with friends, holiday trips and shopping – are all recorded and stored on the servers of different companies and organisations.

How do you protect your privacy online?

These days, however, information is not stored on dusty media in a  closet somewhere. Data is stored on servers connected to the Internet and is bought, sold, used in a variety of ways, and sometimes stolen. And it is more than likely that you would not approve of some of the  uses to which your data is put if you became aware of them. It’s always frustrating to find out that personal information has leaked online and everyone is talking about your break-up with your wife, or that you are  up to your ears in debt because your child needs surgery.

Protecting your identity is a big issue for people of all ages.

Here are simple rules to help keep your privacy safe:

1. Every social network is an invaluable source of information for  cybercriminals who collect personal data which they then use to scam and defraud you. That’s why it’s so important to get your Facebook or any other social networking site’s privacy settings right.

2. Your email contains the ‘keys’ to most of your accounts, as the  password recovery process is most often done via email. It is therefore vital to secure your main email address, to which internet banking and your most important sites (e.g. social networks) are linked. If you want to sign up for a dating site or dubious service, create a second (or even third or fourth) email account.

3.Recently Google launched a special tool that allows users to check what personal information they have  published through various Google services. We recommend you take advantage of this tool – you can learn a lot of interesting things.

4. Don’t post photos of your documents, tickets or pay slips online. Also, don’t share when you’re going on holiday, or half a day and half a night  at the local nightclub. This data is of great interest to both cyber crooks hunting for other people’s finances and common burglars waiting for people to go away for a long time.

5. Don’t use open Wi-Fi networks. They may look like a perfectly trustworthy Internet source, provided by the local café or even the library, but you’ll have trouble distinguishing between “benign” and “malicious” Wi-Fi. All a criminal needs to create such a network is a laptop and a Wi-Fi adapter. And scammers do use this method to intercept logins and passwords of users trying to connect to the Internet using their Wi-Fi networks.