Data Privacy Day is an annual event which aims to raise awareness and promote data protection best practices. James, a paralegal at The Brief Claims, lists some of the ways that you can protect your information online and avoid a data breach.
Data protection is crucial when it comes to avoiding a lot of the scams we see at The Brief Claims. In the wrong hands, scammers will use people’s data, when contacting them via phone, text, or email, to make a more personal approach and to give themselves more legitimacy.
Your data, whilst private, is often readily provided to companies on a daily basis. For each new account created online, an email, phone number, and password are almost always required. In some cases, companies will also be trusted with your home address and banking information.
Unfortunately, when a company is hacked, or data is leaked, this information can be used by criminals. Those who have fallen victim to a data breach will often be unaware of it until they start to receive more spam or cold calls from scammers claiming to be from reputable companies such as BT or Amazon.
Keeping your data safe online can be very difficult, with data breaches essentially unavoidable. The best way to keep yourself safe online is to always use long, complex passwords and to use different passwords for each of your accounts.
There are multiple ways a secure password can be generated. Using password managers and secure password suggestions is a great way to maintain a secure internet presence without the stress of remembering each password. This way, it will be incredibly difficult for a criminal to gain access to all your accounts, although this does rely on you using a very secure password for your password manager.
Another way to stay safe online is to use two-step authentication (also known as 2FA) on your accounts. This is important for accounts which hold your banking information. Doing so means that not only do fraudsters need your password, but they also need your device to access your account – and you will also be notified if and when somebody makes an attempt.
Maintaining updated software and apps ensures that harmful malware on a device is noticed and removed. Virus protection software is also a great way of ensuring peace of mind and comes built into Windows, MacOS, Android and Apple IOS.
Besides the high-tech aspects of online security, a common gateway into your life for a scammer comes from the use of harmful images and links sent in emails. Never click on an image, icon or link from an email unless you are certain it is genuine.
Always look for the “https://” at the start of a web address and look for the padlock at the top of the site, near the search bar. Staying only on secure sites ensures that you are more likely to be dealing with genuine companies. Some websites use “http://”, however, this is a less secure and out-of-date piece of technology, meaning you are safer sticking with websites that use “https:” as it not only promises better security but also demonstrates that the website owner values your security too.
Using a VPN (also known as a virtual private network) can also help you avoid advertisers who target you using location-based data. Equally, if you are using public wi-fi (like the free wifi in a Starbucks or at a train station” you may also be broadcasting your data to other criminals on the same network. Using a VPN is a great way of stopping or at least minimising this risk. It is impossible to know how to secure public Wi-Fi is, who else is using it, and what information are they gleaming from your device. For this reason it is advised that you don’t use free/public wifi to make online purchases or access accounts with banking information.
