Happy New Year! This week we are going to investigate ways that we can recover some of our personal privacy and enhance the our security our online lives.
Let’s face it, many of us have been running amok on the Internet, busily sharing all sorts of personal information on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, and who knows where else. Every time we buy something online, click on an ad or hyperlink, our activities are being tracked, recorded, parsed, and analysed by companies and marketers, in order to “serve us better” and sell us more stuff.
Columbia professor Bernard Harcourt has written Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age
Unfortunately, we can’t just go and unplug from the Internet. The first problem is that we need the Internet to function effectively in modern society. The second problem is that the Internet already has your information, and the information is not going to remove itself. So you would have your work cut out for you.
So the solution is to look at what you have, and take it down a notch or two. Harcourt advises a path of digital resistance and recommends the encryption and privacy tools recommended at such sites as the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Security-in-a-Box. We will be taking a deeper look at Security-in-a-Box in our post this coming Friday.
A simple start for you would be to do a little Google searching for yourself and your family members, and write down all the web sites where you have a profile, account, or other web presence. With the list in hand, decide which of these accounts could just simply be closed. Then close them.
Wednesday we will have an extensive list of tips from the IC3 to help you lower your online profile even more.
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JAN
About the Author:
I am a cybersecurity and IT instructor, cybersecurity analyst, pen-tester, trainer, and speaker. I am an owner of the WyzCo Group Inc. In addition to consulting on security products and services, I also conduct security audits, compliance audits, vulnerability assessments and penetration tests. I also teach Cybersecurity Awareness Training classes. I work as an information technology and cybersecurity instructor for several training and certification organizations. I have worked in corporate, military, government, and workforce development training environments I am a frequent speaker at professional conferences such as the Minnesota Bloggers Conference, Secure360 Security Conference in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, the (ISC)2 World Congress 2016, and the ISSA International Conference 2017, and many local community organizations, including Chambers of Commerce, SCORE, and several school districts. I have been blogging on cybersecurity since 2006 at http://wyzguyscybersecurity.com