Protect Your Privacy With These Seven Tips

Published on: August 14th, 2015

Most of us are familiar with conventional wisdom about protecting our privacy online:  Don’t enter personal credit card information into sketchy web sites and hide information scammers can use to steal your identity like birthdays.

With new privacy concerns popping up virtually every day, we wanted to provide additional information on how to ensure privacy protection.  Here are 7 things you should never do online (or at the least, learn to be more cautious about):

  1. Post Sensitive Photos – We all love to post photos of our vacations, children, and happy times in our lives; however, photos posted while you’re on vacation announce to your community that you are not home and photos of your children could get stolen and used on unsavory sites.
  2. Download Grabby Apps – Before downloading apps, be sure you know what the app is reading and, if it’s gaining access to too much information, do not download it.  A February 2014 Intel report found that 82% of apps were reading the device identification and 59% track your last know location.
  3. Let Your Kids Go Online, Then Pay Your Bills – You may put your accounts at risk if the kids use your computer to explore gaming, free music or others sites that are known for malware and then you do your online banking.  We recommend using a designated computer for your banking and online bill paying, especially one that isn’t online constantly which also increases the risk of hacking and possible identity theft.
  4. Click on Email Message Links – If you are questioning a link sent via email, instead of clicking the link, copy and paste the text into a browser, even if you trust the sender.
  5. Share Vices – You may not think that posting that shot of you smoking on your last girl’s night out is a big deal now, but as more data is stored about you by various companies, you never know what the long-term consequences might be.
  6. Take Quizzes – What Disney princess are you?  What historical figure were you in a past life?  While quizzes can be a fun diversion, there are reports that some are collecting more than your goodwill.  Be sure you look at who created the quiz (i.e. a quiz from the HBO home page is probably being used more appropriately than if some unknown developer created the quiz)
  7. Use Free Wi-Fi – The next time you logon to the coffee shop’s free Wi-Fi, don’t ignore that little notice that tells you others might be able to see what you’re viewing.  You may put yourself at risk for being scammed if you logon to a free wifi account to do your banking or buy something online.

Most importantly, make sure you have up-to-date virus and malware protection on your computers.  For information or questions, contact us at 203.702.2103.  (Excerpts from this article were shared from fastcompany.com)

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