Better protect your personal data online

If you are logged in to social networks, these networks have a lot of information about you. For this reason, we strongly recommend that you review your privacy settings: the decision about what information you want to share with the outside world is entirely up to you.

Tip: Change the privacy settings on your social network accounts.

Oversharing is not exclusive to social networks. Don't use online information-sharing services to store your private information. For example, Google Docs isn't the best place to store a list of your passwords, nor is Dropbox a good place to store copies of your ID cards. unless the archive is encrypted.

Tip: Do not use sharing services to store private data.

When you visit a website, your browser reveals a lot of information about you and your surfing habits. Marketers use this information to profile you and bombard you with ads tailored to your interests.

Even incognito mode cannot prevent tracking of your online activities; Special tools are required for this.

Your reward for sharing your email address and phone number with online services? Tons of spam in your inbox and countless spam calls on your cell phone.

Although you cannot avoid sharing such information with internet services and online stores, you should not reveal your cell phone number or email address to anyone on social networks.

Tip: Create an additional email account and purchase an additional SIM card that you can use for online shopping and other situations where you would need to share your information with strangers.

Many modern messaging apps only encrypt data in transit - meaning messages are decrypted on the provider's side and stored on the appropriate servers. But what happens if these servers are hacked?

It's better not to take this risk and opt for end-to-end encryption; This means that even the provider of the messaging service has no insight into your conversations.

Tip: Use a messaging app with end-to-end encryption, such as WhatsApp, and note that Facebook Messenger, Telegram and Google Allo do not use end-to-end encryption by default.

To activate this, you have to start a private chat manually.

If you use weak passwords to protect your private information, you might as well broadcast your information to the world.

It's almost impossible to remember long, unique passwords for all the services you use; However, with a password manager you only have to remember a single master password.

Tip: Use long (12 characters or more) passwords and, above all, use a different password for each service. To make it easier to use more securely, use a password manager.

Mobile apps ask you to grant them permissions to access contacts or files in the device storage and use the camera, microphone, geolocation, etc. In fact, many apps cannot function without these permissions, while others use this information solely to profile you for marketing purposes.

Fortunately, you can easily control the permissions specifically granted to each app. The same applies to browser extensions, which often have spying tendencies.

Tip: Take a look at the permissions you grant to mobile apps and don't install browser extensions if you don't really need them.

Our computers and cell phones store a lot of data that we would prefer to keep private. So protect your devices with passwords.

These passwords don't have to be complicated and unique, but they should prevent unwanted people from accessing your devices. For mobile devices, you'll want to be a little smarter and opt for six-digit PIN numbers or actual passwords instead of four-digit PIN numbers or screen lock patterns.

For devices that support biometric authentication, keep in mind that these technologies have some limitations.

Tip: Use passwords or biometric authentication to protect your smartphones, tablets, and computers.

You protect your smartphone with a long, secure password, but can you still see notifications on the lock screen?

To ensure that this information is no longer displayed on the lock screen, notifications should be set up accordingly.

Tip: Turn off lock screen notifications or hide sensitive information.

Public Wi-Fi networks typically do not encrypt traffic, and this means anyone on the same network can try to access your traffic.

Don't transmit sensitive information (logins, passwords, credit card details, etc.) over public Wi-Fi and use a VPN to encrypt your data and keep it away from prying eyes.

Tip: Avoid public Wi-Fi networks if possible. If you can't avoid connecting to a public hotspot, always use a VPN.