5 Tips to Protect Your Privacy Online
Our private data can sometimes be misused online, or for advertising purposes. Here are five tips to help you protect them.
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Control your smartphone and computer
Did you know that all the apps you have installed on your smartphone collect data about your privacy? When you install a new application, you have to accept a set of criteria: do you allow access to your camera, SMS, contacts or banking data? And all this information is of course used for marketing purposes. Unfortunately, in most cases, you cannot decline access to all of these data (except usually the credit card). So you can only be warned and decide in any case whether installing this application is worth it or not.
The same is true for the sites on which you register; you often have to fill out forms with personal data. Keep in mind that these sites store all this data carefully. Fortunately, the RGPD, the general regulation on data protection, was adopted recently and strengthens and unifies data protection for all users in the European Union.
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Change your settings
Each site or application has privacy settings that can be customized. The problem is that users often don’t take the time to look at them and change them. However, this is essential. On Facebook, in particular, you can change the settings for your account as well as your photo to be private. Attention, by default, they are almost always public. Therefore, it is imperative to change by yourself.
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Delete your old accounts
If you have old accounts that you no longer use, we advise you to delete them as they still contain personal data that could be used. However, it is not as easy as it sounds to remove any trace of your presence on social networks.
On Facebook, the option to delete his account is well hidden. If you go into the “settings” and then the “security settings“, you can just turn it off. Facebook keeps your data in case, of course, you want to come back. If you want to delete it completely, you have to go to this link.
On Twitter, you can delete your account by going to ” Settings “, “Account” and then ” deactivate “. But be careful, the social media will still keep your data for 30 days.
If you wish to delete your account on other sites, we advise you to Account Killer. It offers more than 500 sites from which it helps you remove yourself more easily. All you have to do is look for the platform you no longer use and click on the link. In the best case, he will delete your account directly, and if he does not manage to do so, he will tell you how to proceed.
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Browse privately
It is important to know that when you go to a website, your browser keeps track of your passage in history. But not just in that form. It also stores what we call cookies. These are data files that are created by a website and that are stored to keep information about you for use on your next login. If you want to avoid being tracked while surfing, we advise you to use private navigation. It allows you to visit websites without the history or cookies being saved on your computer. To activate it, simply open your browser (e.g., Chrome), go to “file” and then open a new private browser window.
You can also download the Tor software. It allows you to navigate anonymously through a relay server system that prevents your data from being tracked. If you want to download it, you can find it here.
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Protect your data
Don’t forget to protect all the data found on the various websites you have registered. To do this, don’t forget to respect a few rules so that your passwords are as efficient as possible. For example, choose different passwords for each site, change them regularly and choose long and not too obvious passwords. If you want to read the top 5 things not to do to set a good password, it’s here.