Easy Ways to Protect Your Web Privacy

 Want to know how you can keep your personal information safe? Follow this article to the end. Protecting your system’s privacy while you are offline is easy compared to when your device gets connected to the internet. It is becoming harder to stay private while being online at the same time.

Almost every website requires you to fill forms, thereby occupying your name and number, email address, and sometimes even your search history. In today’s world, you can’t keep your details private from a search engine. So here arises a question on how you can protect your privacy online? Is it even possible to keep your details confidential, especially when there are so many websites and businesses trying to deal with your details over the web?

Below, we have tried to provide several tips that can be used for keeping your details private.

Refrain from Providing Too Much Information in Forms

If we take an example of a signup option, some columns are not necessary. So, avoid filling those so that a lesser amount of information can go on the website’s portal. We recommend you to refrain yourself from answering every question on a web form. If entering the identifying information like your physical address, middle name, employer, etc. is not required, then please don’t fill it. Also, think twice about the information which you are entering in the required fields.

You can provide your fake details if you think the forms you are filling are irrelevant or not of much use. You can enter a disposable email address instead of entering your real email address and internet phone number in place of a phone number.

Clean up Your Search History

Many browsers are smart enough to keep track of every single word you would have typed in your address bar. You need to clear out this history for the sake of your privacy as well as for letting your computer run at an optimum speed. Ctrl+Shift+Del works on the majority of browsers to clear the web search history.

Log out of Search Engine Accounts

Many search engines would ask you to create an account and log in to get access to their complete service. To protect your privacy, it is best recommended that you log out of your account after you have completed running your web searches. It is a bit similar to clearing your search history. But this process doesn’t actually delete your information; it makes your information inaccessible to anyone else who uses that specific device.

Be Cautious While Downloading Anything

You need to watch out what you are downloading. You should be extremely cautious while downloading anything from the web. This way, you can easily avoid spyware that otherwise can enter your system and track all your information. Some programs also have adware, whose main aim is to track and report your surfing habits to the third-party associated with it. The details collected might be used by them to send you unwanted emails or ads too.

Don’t Share Your Private Information

You should always make sure that you are not sharing something which would let you regret later on. While dealing with a blog, message board, comments section, or any social media site, etc., make sure that you do not share something that you would have considered sharing in real life.

Never share any sort of information that could identify you in public. If you share anything personal, it might lead to unauthorized access to your email account’s password, locating your physical address or location.

Be Cautious on Social Media Sites

Sites like Facebook and Twitter are very much popular, as they allow people to connect with each other from across the world. So, you need to check if your privacy settings are set appropriately or not. You should also make sure that the content you share on social networking sites is not revealing anything related to your personal or financial nature. Anything, from comments, photos, or profile details, can let your privacy be at risk.

Watch out for Threats

You should watch out for all sorts of online threats like the emails that promise to give free computers, links that might lead to virus-laden websites, and more. These kinds of links might be malicious and can add viruses to your PC. So, you should be very careful while opening these kinds of links. The links might be malicious if they include misspellings, improper grammar, and also lack of secure encryption.

Protect Your Handset and PC

You can keep your handset and PC safe from harmful interference with just a few precautions. You can protect them by using a firewall, updating your software programs regularly, and keeping antivirus software on your system. Both desktops and handsets are equally prone to threats if they have a lack of security on them.

So, these were our recommendations to protect your web privacy. You can use the tips mentioned above to keep your details private and free from the hands of attackers or data leakers.

Source : https://yellvotes.com/blog/easy-ways-to-protect-your-web-privacy/

A Guide to Protect Privacy on Android

 The smartphones these days have a lot on us. From our contacts and location to our favorite hangouts and passwords, we happily fed all the information to “free” services like Google and others. If you don’t know how to handle your data with these applications and devices, you can likely fall prey to scammers who are waiting for a single chance to get their hands on our valuable information. Fortunately, there are a lot of tools available within the Android ecosystem to secure our private data, and this guide will tell you how.

Use the Lock Screen

Setting a basic PIN, password, or pattern is the bare minimum one can do to add a security layer on their smartphone. Forget about malicious software or bugs, physical phone theft is more common. And if you haven’t added a screen lock with a strong password, sifting through your pictures and emails to access your data will be a cakewalk for this thief. To save yourself from such troubles, it is always a good idea to enable a lock screen. To do so, navigate to Settings > Security > Screen Lock. Select the preferred password lock type that you would like to use every time you access your phone.

Device Encryption

You can’t underestimate the criminals these days. They are as skilled and techie as anyone else can be. They likely know how to get through a locked phone to access your files. Device encryption would be the best solution for this. Encrypting the device means, all of your files will be put into a format that can be understood only after decrypting it, which requires a proper key, or a password that only you will know. To encrypt the data on your Android, head to the Settings followed by the Security menu. Here you will find options to encrypt both the data on your smartphone and microSD card.

Find My Device

By far, Google’s Find My Phone is the best feature it can have. Using this service, you can link all your Google accounts and manage your Android devices remotely, provided you are connected to the web.

You can easily log into Find My Device through any web browser and device. Once you log in, a list of all your devices will appear with options to track their location, make them ring, or “enable lock and erase”. The Lock and Erase feature helps you to remotely lock your Android device, and erase all of the data on the device if it has been stolen.

VPN (Virtual Private Networks)

A criminal accessing your data after stealing your Android device is another thing. And those bad guys tracking what you are looking at and downloading online while your device is right in your hands is a completely different thing. Setting up a Virtual Private Network (VPN) is the best way out of this. By doing so, you won’t be communicating directly with every website that you visit.

VPN adds an extra layer of privacy by preventing your device from directly connecting at an end service. However, you should know that they don’t make you completely invisible. If someone is interested in knowing what you are up to, they can still find their way. The ExpressVPN and IP Vanish are highly recommended for better privacy and faster browsing speeds. These four were very few from the list of all possible measures that can be taken to protect privacy on Android. However, if you are the one who never gave a thought to the compromised privacy on your smartphone, these should be more than enough for a start. As a suggestion to keep your data secure on the applications and your smart devices, consider keeping location usage to a minimum, uninstall or disable unnecessary apps, keep a check on app permissions after updating them, and change your passwords at regular intervals.

Source : https://the-grabber.com/a-guide-to-protect-privacy-on-android/