Protecting Your Data
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- November 2020
There are many reasons why you should protect your data. Most of us in our lifetimes will experience at least one instance of hacking into one of our accounts - whether it’s banking information, an email account, or social media profile. In this section we have broken down privacy into two categories - basic and advanced. Basic privacy protocols are things everyone should be doing. More advanced protocols are for those who are interested in being more anonymous than the average user. It’s important to note that the more privacy protocols you enact, the less convenient it might be to use various apps, websites, and devices. The balance between privacy and convenience is something that everyone must decide for themselves.
Basic Privacy Protocols
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Use a password manager
A password manager is a great way to ensure that all of your accounts have strong, unique passwords without you having to memorize each and every one of them. The password manager you use should require a password in order to access it and provide organized security across all of your accounts. Never use the same password twice!
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Two-factor authentication
Many companies have begun to provide two-factor authentication. What this means is that after you enter your login information, there is a second step you must complete in order to access whichever account you are using at that moment. Generally, this means providing an email address or phone number that the company will send an automated, randomly generated passcode to and you must enter that passcode in order to access your account and verify your identity.
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Never answer security questions truthfully
This may seem counterintuitive, but the sad truth is that most of your personal information is already readily available on the internet. If your security question is “Where were you born?”, a quick internet search could provide these answers to a hacker quite easily. You can utilize your password manager to store your “fake” security question answers safely.
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Use a privacy browser
Mozilla Firefox in particular has put forth many security measures in order to protect your data. Their newest browser even claims to protect you from browser fingerprinting. There are other privacy browsers available as well. Most importantly, always clear your browser data after every session!
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Set your homepage to www.duckduckgo.com
Most of us instinctively set our homepage in our preferred browser to Google. While Google is an incredibly useful search engine, they are notorious for collecting astronomical amounts of information about you and their reasons for it as well as what they do with it are kept secret. DuckDuckGo is a great search engine that uses private search, tracker blocking, and site encryption.
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Use a VPN
VPN stands for Virtual Private Network and it helps to hide your identity, internet service provider (also known as ISP), and encrypts traffic coming to and from your network. Avoid free VPNs as they usually are not as secure as the ones you pay for. NordVPN is a reputable provider of privacy services
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Disable location services and bluetooth on all devices
This is not to say that you can never use location services or bluetooth, but you should only allow location services and bluetooth to be active when you are actually using an application that needs it. Having it run in the background unnecessarily is just one more way for corporations or criminals to track where you are and what you’re doing.
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Remove unused applications
This applies for all devices - computers, tablets, and smartphones. You might not think it’s so bad to have some apps hanging around that you don’t really use, but those apps are often collecting data about you in the background without you knowing it. If you use the app less than once a week, delete it!
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Never use biometric passwords
Biometrics is using biological information about a user to uniquely identify them. Common biometric identifiers are fingerprints and facial recognition. To secure your data across your devices, don’t use these biometric identifiers because they are data that can be stored and potentially bought and sold. Instead, use a long pin number. Don’t ever use your birthday or other significant dates that would be easy to decipher.
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Social media
Your social media account should have the strongest privacy settings possible. Social media can be fun and great for networking, but the joy we get from interacting with others on the internet often makes us forget about the dangers of social media.
Advanced Privacy Protocols
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Use iMessage or Signal for texting
Standard SMS texting is very insecure, but most people don’t realize that. It’s quite easy for someone who knows what they’re doing to tap into your text conversations. To protect yourself, you can use iMessage if you are an iPhone user or use a service like Signal to encrypt your texts and your phone calls.
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Use ProtonMail
ProtonMail is an email service that is open source and encrypts all of the information in your emails. Email hacking is extremely common and most email service providers can already automatically detect if an email sent to you is fraudulent and direct it to your spam folder, but email services like Gmail and Yahoo also collect your information for themselves. By using their services, you are allowing them to collect myriad data about who you’re talking to, what you’re talking about, and what accounts you have linked to that email.
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Encrypt your hard drive
Protecting your hard drive protects all the valuable data you have stored on it. Most of us already know to back up our hard drives in case of failure, but how many of us are protecting it with encryption? Hard drive encryption services like BitLocker for Windows or FileLocker for MacOS are great places to start. Also, it’s important to periodically clean your hard drive’s free space by using a service like CCleaner.
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Use Tor Browser
The Tor Project describes their mission as: “To advance human rights and freedoms by creating and deploying free and open source anonymity and privacy technologies, supporting their unrestricted availability and use, and furthering their scientific and popular understanding.”
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Delete all social media
This may sound extreme, but if you are extremely concerned about privacy, it would be beneficial to delete all your personal social media accounts. Social media provides a great way to identify and track you and to prevent this from happening altogether, all accounts should be removed.
If you’re interested in evaluating how secure your personal data privacy practices are, check out the “Testing Your Anonymity” link in the “More Resources” section at the top right of this article. It’s a wonderfully compiled checklist published by the Techlore YouTube channel.
