Check All Of Your Social Privacy Settings
First and foremost, you want to check all of your social privacy settings. While social platforms can be a great way to connect with your friends and family, they can also be a gateway to allowing people to intrude. These accounts typically house a lot of data and information about you. This is data that you want to protect. Unfortunately, these platforms and apps don’t do much in the way of protecting them. Because of this, you want to try to secure as much of it as possible. You want to decide what to share with people you don’t know. Go into the privacy settings and block off anything you don’t want to share with strangers. Here is how to change your privacy settings for the various apps and platforms you are using.
Avoid Using Public Storage For Private Information
You also don’t want to overshare on other networks and services. You don’t want to store your private information or data on things like Google Docs or even Dropbox. These aren’t going to be a great place to store a digital copy of your passport or license. The only way you should be using these servers for private information is when they are encrypted.
Evade Tracking
One of the things a lot of people may be unfamiliar with is cookie and browser tracking. Ever visited a website only to receive advertising for that website on a completely different site? If so, that’s due to browser trackers. A lot of marketers will pay to use this information to target you. Because of this, you need to work towards evading them. While Incognito is a start, it’s not going to completely help you avoid being tracked. Instead, you’ll need to install special extensions such as RARBG mirror.
You can use browser extensions that block trackers or use a browser like Firefox that does it automatically.
Keep Your Phone Number and Email Private
The last thing you want to do is share your email and phone number. These things should be kept as private as possible. You don’t want to do this because you’ll find yourself getting bombarded with all kinds of spam emails and phone calls. The best thing to do would be to avoid sharing these things completely. However, that’s not an option for most. Because of this, you want to create emails and phone numbers that you dedicate to creating accounts. This can keep your real phone number and email secure and free of spam.
Use The Right Messaging Apps
Don’t use traditional SMS messaging. Likewise, don’t use other messaging apps that aren’t providing end-to-end encryption. You want to stick to using apps that provide end-to-end encryption as much as possible. There are plenty of apps out there that will deliver you this level of protection like Signal. Some chat apps do have it, but they won’t enable it by default. To do so, you’ll need to manually enable it. With Facebook messenger, you’ll need to start a secret chat.