How To Safeguard Your Personal Data

Your personal information or data in the wrong hands can be used for fraudulent purposes making safeguarding it imperative in today’s digital world.  This podcast gives tips on how to keep yourself safe.

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Host:

00:00

Podcasting from Southern California, this is on the net your go to for everything you need to know about how to get your business online and keep it there. Brought to you by Lunarpages. We will help you navigate the mystifying ins and outs of doing business in today’s digital era from web hosting to e-commerce to security and protection. If it has to do with your online presence, we’ve got to cover. Let’s get started.

Host:

00:31

Hello everyone.  For those of you joining us for the first time, welcome to On The Net, where it’s all about your online presence.  For those who listened last week, thanks for coming back.  This podcast is designed to make doing business online easy for web designers, developers, bloggers and online business of every shape and size.  Whether you are new to buying web hosting or running a web site, this podcast show will be able to answer your most burning questions.  Today I am going to address the hot topic of ‘How to Safeguard your Personal Data’ I am sure you must have heard of Cambridge Analytica, the political data firm that accessed the private information of more than 50 million Facebook users for purposes that violated Facebook’s rules. This has sparked off a much-needed debate about how our society can protect privacy.  The first question that comes to mind is what is personal information?

Host:

01:22

I guess, we can call any factual or subjective information which allows you to be identified as personal information. It could be your full name, date of birth, address, your religion, your occupation, or the alias you use for your Pinterest account and more. This information in the wrong hands can be used for fraudulent purposes to hack into your bank account, falsely apply for credit cards and loans, defraud other people using your identity. Your personal information can be stolen from discarded paper or digital devices with sensitive information in the garbage, phishing emails, scam phone calls, malware from dodgy sites, or even when using public wi-fi. But personal information can also be harvested through what you do online on a regular basis. If you think about it, we are constantly leaving a digital trail about our personal traits and behaviors through social networking sites, smart home devices and systems, connected fitness devices and other mobile apps, etc.

Host:

02:16

For instance, Google tracks your activities through their search engine, email service, Google Maps., and have thousands of data points about you that machine learning algorithms can crawl through to identify you. Therefore, the possibility and threat of being profiled and monetized by unknown third parties (and by that we mean ad network, data broker or other advertising or monetization-related companies) without our consent has become very real. The time has come for companies to put tighter and enforceable restrictions on data sharing with ‘third parties’ or ‘affiliates’ in order to protect consumers. But even consumers have to pull up their digital bootstraps and lockdown all personal identifiable data on the net.