Stop giving your information away carelessly!

27 tips for improving your cyber-hygiene

Who is most responsible for your online privacy being violated?

You are.

Privacy is one of the biggest concerns in tech news recently. The importance of personal privacy is something everybody seems to be able to agree on. But if you’re concerned about privacy, then you need stop giving your information away willy-nilly. Because you probably are.

Well, maybe you are. See how many of the following best practices you already follow.

1. Passwords. Install and learn how to use a password manager on all your devices. There are many fine ones on the market.
2. Let your password manager generate your passwords for you. You never even need to know what your passwords are, once you’ve got the password managers set up.
3. Make sure you make a secure password for the password manager!
4. Stop letting your browser save passwords. Your password manager handles that.
5. If ever you have reason to send a password to another person online, break it into two or more files (texts, emails, whatever) in different media, then totally delete those files. Also, some password managers help with this.
6. Credit cards and other personal info. Stop letting your browser save your credit cards. Your password manager handles that.
7. Stop letting web vendors save your credit card info on their servers, unless absolutely necessary (e.g., for subscriptions). Again, your password manager handles that. Maybe you should go delete them now. I’ll wait.
8. If you give your credit card info out online, always check that the website has the “lock” next to its address on the address bar. That means it uses the https protocol (i.e., uses encryption).
9. Stop answering “additional security” questions with correct answers, especially correct answers that hackers might discover with research. Treat the answer fields as passwords, and record them in your password manager.
10. Stop filling out the “optional” information on account registration forms. Give away only the required information.
11. Americans, for chrissakes stop giving out your social security number and allowing others to use it as an ID, unless absolutely required.
12. Stop giving your email address out when doing face-to-face purchases. Those companies don’t actually need it.
13. Stop trusting the Internet giants with your data. Consider moving away from Gmail. Google has admitted it reads your mail—all the better to market to you, my dear. Gmail isn’t all that, really.
14. Maintain your own calendar. When meeting, let others add your name, but don’t let them add your email address, if you have a choice.
15. Maintain your own contacts. No need to let one of the Internet giants take control of that for you. It’s not that hard. Then have them delete their copies.
16. If you’re an Apple person, stop using iCloud to sync your devices. Use wi-fi instead.
17. Browser and search engine hygiene. Use a privacy-respecting browser, such as Brave or Firefox. (This will stop your browsing activity from being needlessly shared with Google or Microsoft.)
18. If you must use a browser without built-in tracking protection (like Chrome), then use a tracker-blocking extension (like Privacy Badger).
19. Use a privacy-respecting search engine, such as DuckDuckGo or Qwant. (Ditto.)
20. Social media, if you must. On social media, start learning and taking the privacy settings more seriously. There are many options that allow you to lock down your data to some degree.
21. Make posts “private” on Facebook, especially if they have any personal details. If you didn’t know the difference between “private” and “public” posts, learn this. And a friend says: “Stop playing Facebook quizzes.”
22. Stop digitally labeling your photos and other social posts with time and location. Make sure that data is removed before you post.
    (Putting it in the text description is better.)
23. For crying out loud, stop posting totally public pictures of your vacation while you are vacation. Those pictures are very interesting to burglars. Wait until you get home, at least.
24. Sorry, but stop sharing pictures of your children on social. (This is just my opinion. I know you might differ. But it makes me nervous.)
25. Consider quitting social media altogether. Their business models are extremely hostile to privacy. You (and your private info) are the product, after all.
26. A couple of obvious(?) last items. Make sure you’re using a firewall and some sort of anti-virus software.
27. Don’t be the idiot who opens email attachments from strangers.

How many did you answer “I do that!” to? I scored 22, to be totally honest, but it’ll be up to 27 soon. Answer below. Well, answer only if you have a high score, or if you use a pseudonym. I don’t want hackers to know who they can hit up for an easy win!