Best Tips to Protect Your Privacy on the Internet
Are you hooked to the internet and social networks? Do you know that the content you keep on your profiles and devices can get into the hands of hackers if you don’t protect them properly? Follow the advice we give you in this article to protect your privacy.
Computers, tablets and smartphones are the main tools that we use in our day-to-day life to interact with others. Now we are able to share the moments that we are living instantly. But all this new panorama carries risks that most people ignore.
Your computer, your mobile and any other device that has internet access can be hacked by people you don’t want. It is true that there are small remedies to avoid these circumstances. For example, some home insurance covers assistance to protect your computer from possible viruses that are harmful to your system. See the most curious coverage that your home insurance covers.
However, installing a good antivirus is not enough to protect your privacy on computer or phone. The personal data that we store in them and the information that we send need many more measures that guarantee almost complete security. Don’t know what you have to do to protect yourself from network threats? Don’t worry, here are the most essential tips!
Tips to Protect Your Privacy on the Internet
Use different passwords
It is quite common for a person to use the same password to access different social profiles. It is a practice that, apart from making things easier for the user, also paves the way for hackers. Any leakage of your data in a certain social network can lead to the delivery of the other profiles.
The most recommended is to vary the keys and that they are not deductible with the basic personal data. That is, we must avoid putting as a password our phone number, our date of birth, our name and surnames, etc.
By avoiding these practices and combining lowercase, uppercase and numbers with an extension greater than 8 characters – these are recommendations given by certain social networks such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter – the security of our profiles will be increased.
Read the website privacy policy carefully
We must be careful with the web places where we enter. Many of them attack our computer with viruses. Many others are apparently safe, but require us to enter a series of private data without a clear privacy policy. In this type of cases, we should not enter our personal information under any circumstances and it is convenient to leave the page.
When the website in which we are going to register has a clear privacy policy, the best thing we can do is read it well, to realize that our data will be safe. Only in this way we can get an idea of whether such page is reliable or not to preserve the privacy of our data.
Save your files to a hard drive
We have a bad habit of saving photos, movies, documents and music, among other things, on our mobile phones and computers. Maintaining these elements in the devices, apart from occupying memory space, endangers them.
The best way to prevent the effects of a possible attack on our privacy is to have the minimum documents stored on this type of device. Apart from that they could be damaged by certain viruses, the stored items could also be extracted by hackers.
For this reason, it is convenient to save most of these files on a hard drive or USB flash drive. Secure your memories by doing this tip!
Protect your devices with a password
Protect your privacy on the different websites does not only depend on the behaviors you adopt once you are online. Keeping the various devices you interact with secure is another important factor in keeping your personal information safe.
What is a good option to protect them? Put a password or pattern on all of them. We are in the worst: our mobile phone, in which we have documents and personal images, has been stolen. In the case of not having a password, our data is exposed to another person who can use it maliciously.
By installing a security code we make it very difficult for the thief to access the private data stored by our devices (as long as the passwords are not simple or deductible). From Terránea, we encourage you to adopt this practice that costs you nothing and will only provide you with a dose of the necessary security.
Dosing personal information
To protect your privacy on the internet, it is important to provide the necessary and fair information in any portal where you want to register. In many cases, web pages require personal information that has little relevance to the service we want to have. When this occurs, it is best not to provide such information.
On other occasions, the websites offer a certain prize at no cost; all they ask for is the user’s personal and private data. What should you do? Run away from that page that only wants information from you to take advantage of it and to appropriate your online privacy.
Don’t trust all open WiFi networks
What joy we are when we see that we have an open WiFi network near our location! However, these networks, sometimes, are a poisoned candy that we should not trust.
We all like to take advantage of this type of network to save data or to use the computer in a place where we do not have our own internet. It is true that, as long as we know the origin of this signal, open WiFi networks are a gift without cheating.
The problem and the risk come when we talk about a strange network. The provenance of this connection is unknown, which means that any cyber criminal could be behind it. What could be the consequences if you use this type of network? That the possible hacker could infect your device and redirect your traffic to fraudulent pages to get your data.
check How To Protect Your Phone Privacy On A Public WiFi
Provide bank details only to secure websites
If we have valuable information for hackers, that is our bank account number. To get this data, cyber criminals take advantage of people’s ignorance and create fake web pages or send emails posing as a bank.
Where can I safely transfer my financial data? On secure servers –that is, those pages whose URL begins with “https” – and on reliable services such as PayPal. As long as you enter your bank details on these platforms, your bank privacy will be guaranteed!
Keep social profiles private
Are you one of those with private or public social profiles ? Although it seems silly, it is a decision that can lead to more than one problem. Having a profile open to everyone can cost us dearly.
There are cybercriminals who use information from people’s public profiles to impersonate their identity on other networks, to defraud those people’s acquaintances, to violate security controls on computer platforms or to affect their professional image, taking controversial thoughts or photos.
For all this, it is most recommended to keep social profiles private, especially on pages where important moments and relevant information from our lives appear – for example, Facebook.
Update applications and operating systems
Constant updates to applications and operating systems give us much safer versions for mobiles and computers. The older a version of this type is, the more vulnerable our device is, since it contains programming errors that are corrected with the creation of these updates.
Cyber criminals infiltrate these old systems through malicious programs – so-called malware. Do you want to avoid it? Update your mobile and computer updates!
Reject requests from people you don’t know
It may seem absurd, but the truth is that there are many people who accept requests from unknown people. Badly done. It is useless to keep our profile private if we voluntarily allow our photos and comments on social networks to people we have not seen in life. We should not accept any such request!
