As our societies become steadily more digital, we all face the necessity to protect our identity on our online accounts. This is a challenging task for many of us as it often implies remembering a plethora of different passwords and usernames. The temptation is high to reuse the same password on every account. After all, how high is the probability that some hacker would show any interest in my account?
Well, according to IdentityForce, one US citizen out of fifteen have been exposed to identity theft. Consequences span from malicious accesses to your social media accounts to seeing someone taking a bank loan in your name.
Another issue is the growing influence of companies working with your private information to influence elections, as we’ve seen with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, making it seemingly impossible to keep our data private.
Here are three simple steps to secure your digital life:
Use a secure password
This is a critical point. If a hacker gains access to your e-mail account, he now has access to your whole digital life. If your password is in the list of the ten most use passwords, you should change it immediately!
A secure password does not need to be impossible to remember:
- Think of a sentence, preferably with a number in it;
- Take the first letter or two of each word;
- Add some special characters;
- Be sure there are at least eight characters in total.
Use a different password on every website
You now have a secure password. But what if the same one is also in use on all your other accounts? The hacker can now login with the same credentials on your social media accounts, on your online shopping accounts and so on.
This is particularly important for your email account, since the email account can be used to reset password on many other online accounts.
Using a different password on every account is achievable by using a password manager. At Fjordmail we advise the free service BitWarden or the subscription-based LastPass.
Select a privacy-respecting e-mail service provider
When using a free service, you are the product. In other words, private information about yourself and your relatives can be sold to third-parties such as corporations dealing with Big Data. They use your data to influence purchases or even elections by showing you targeted advertising.
Fjordmail is a subscription-based and ad-free e-mail service provider which does not need to sell your data to survive. We promise to keep your privacy safe and to handle your data in a secure manner.
