Tips for Internet Privacy

What do we mean by online privacy threats? 

Safety and privacy are the most critical assets for a human being to look after and protect from being trespassed or exposed to any kind of threat. 

Imagine, you are visiting a doctor for a consultation, and once you get out of the examination room, all the patients in the waiting area are staring at you, and whispering among themselves about your medical case, after being heard from behind the not well-secured door.  

Another case is having your financial status and bank statement checked by unwanted people after you have left them unattended in your office corridor, or someone following you to the mall while telling your friends about each stop you have made on your way or what items you have bought.  

Anyone is a subject for such incidents; thus, we need to protect our privacy in both the digital and real world. With the current digital revolution and constant online presence, the risks and threats associated with our online privacy are increasing tremendously, especially with the presence of social media, mobile applications, and all the websites which we browse on daily basis, looking for information or free applications to use.  

Such services can reveal a lot of details about us, or even can give full access and ownership over our data to the application developer, or even to a third party, like an advertising agency, who bombards us with millions of ads once we tried to search for some wording related to a product through the search engines. 

How to manage our online privacy 

Therefore, it is important and necessary for us, to well manage our digital presence and privacy, and make sure we are on top of the following privacy measures: 

Be careful about what to share:

Being active online with a high number of followers and contacts increases the risk of being targeted and sharing and posting personal information and photos, without taking into consideration your privacy will deteriorate your online reputation, even it might affect and threaten your personal life.  

It is recommended to limit your online activities as well your contacts while taking a closer look at who are your friends online, assessing the items you are willing to share, and analyzing the level of harm it might bring for you and for your family if it has fallen in a wrong hand. 

Secure your Social Media accounts:

All platforms, do have under their settings, a section to control and enhance your account’s privacy settings by limiting who you share your personal information, photos, and location with, in addition to who can share and read your posts, or even tag you in photos.  

Activating such services will enhance and protect your online privacy. Some governing policies have been issued such as the General Data Protection Regulation “GDPR”, to control and give the users the ability to manage, review, correct, and even request deletion of the data collected by the service providers. 

Secure your Mobile devices:

 The applications you have installed on your mobile phone are a high threat to your privacy. By installing and accepting their Privacy and Terms policies, without speeding few minutes to read it, exposes you, all your contacts, and photos stored on your phone to high privacy and identity theft risks. By installing those applications, you are granting the developer full access to all your personal details stored on that phone, such as, contact list, photos, location, stored documents, and even the ability to activate the phone's camera and microphone, which allows the developer to spy on you without your knowledge.

Therefore, it is recommended to: 

• Read the terms and conditions of the application. 
• Check the source of the company that developed that application. 
• Limit the application's access to your phone. 
• Secure your mobile phone by using the regular screen lock or biometric features. 
• Back up your data to the cloud. 
• Enable full device encryption and wipe it off if someone tries to access it using a wrong passcode. 

Change your browsing habits:

websites, in general, do track users browsing habits and record their details by installing small scripts “cookies” into the browsers files, all that is just to enhance users browsing experiences and to share with them interesting suggestions relevant to their search and even to open their last visited pages using the same settings they have chosen in the last time they accessed the website. In addition, websites can use other types of trackers which can collect more details about the user and even his device.  

Always, make sure to not accept and to not install website cookies, or any other type of trackers unless necessary, and make sure to delete them once done from your browser's setting. Alternatively, you can get yourself to use secure browsing features, like Incognito (available in chrome), and InPrivate (available in edge). 

Protect your digital device:

Your digital devices are very important, protecting them, means protecting yourself from any malicious threat such as Spywares and viruses, which can steal or destroy your private and highly confidential data.  

Apply the correct security measures on your devices, such as antivirus, firewall, and even encrypting your confidential data. In addition, using a strong password with Multi-factor authentication will protect you from being exposed to identity theft as well to have your data stolen. 

Even thus, there is a lot of online security and privacy recommendation which we did not go through, following the above recommendations, will surely enhance your online privacy and protect your online presence from being exposed to the unwanted situation, or even having your personal details stolen and published.