This Is How You Can Strengthen Your Online Privacy
January 28 has been marked as Data Privacy Day. The main goal of having a Data Privacy Day is to spread awareness and promote privacy and data protection online. Data protection has become even more significant in the post-COVID-19 world where almost everything has been shifted online, be it work, school or examinations or even shopping. Even though a lot of people are fairly cautious about their online practices, most people end up making simple errors that could prove to be dangerous
Shane McNamee, the Chief Privacy Officer at Avast explains that it is important to regularly keep a check on your privacy and the personal data that you choose to share online, including the social media apps.
And as we all know that it is better to be safe than to be sorry, let’s discuss these six easy steps that have been suggested by McNamee in order to ensure that users have their privacy under control when they are online:
- Manage ad targeting
Users can choose whether they want advertisements and what type of advertisers can target them on various social media sites. Users can tweak their advertising settings and protect their privacy better. They can remove interests that any site uses to target you and further remove personal data. Users can choose the option of ‘Off-Twitter Activity’ on Twitter and the option of ‘Ads Shown off of Facebook’ on Facebook in order to put a stop to tracking and ad targeting.
- Don’t allow location tracking
Tracking location and history is a classic practice by various online platforms in order to track your location and then target specific, personalised ads towards you. A good way to put a stop to this is by turning off the Location in your smartphone for all social media apps along with the camera. You can also choose the apps that you want to give location services access to.
- Avoid logging in
There are certain social media apps that do not require you to log in or register to view the content like Twitter and TikTok. Unless absolutely necessary, you can just choose not to log in to these apps. This way you can avoid risking huge amounts of data that they could have accessed otherwise by tracking your search options or locations.
- Be careful when allowing permissions
Many people choose to sign in to other apps and sites with their Facebook or Google login as it is an easier alternative instead of filling in all the details manually. But this convenient option provides the sites access to your data and also allows Facebook data access for these sites. You can revoke these permissions in your Facebook settings.
- Avoid clicking on ads
A lot of social media apps track not only which ads you tap on but also how much time you spend on these redirected sites. If you don’t want social media to have knowledge about your likes and interests, try avoiding all the ads and the “Shop” feature present on Instagram and Google. In case you see something you don’t want to avoid, you can search it on your browser while using a VPN which makes it hard for third-parties to track you online.
- Use a burner email address
A great step for keeping a check on your privacy is by creating a burner email address. This email address can be only used for specific purposes and as a result, will not be linked to you anywhere else making it difficult for third-parties to track you. You can easily create a burner email address on Gmail for free but never link it to your main account. It is advisable to use a different email service so you can avoid linking your two accounts even by mistake.