Would you give a stranger your social security card or a blank check? Of course not! You want to protect yourself, your money and your identity.
You need to protect yourself while you use your phone, PC, the Internet, etc. Contact information on your phone, electronic banking links, financial spreadsheets, etc. should all be protected from prying eyes.
Here are some suggestions for keeping your personal data safe:
On your PC or flash drives:
- Password-protect or encrypt financial and personal data files.
- Make the passwords “strong”. See my post (http://www.davidrier.com/?p=29) if you don’t know how.
On the Internet:
- Email:
- I suggest having three different emails addresses: 1) A personal email address, 2) a “shopping” email address for use when you buy items on the Internet, and 3) an “information” email address when you want/need information from a web site. The information email address will tend to be the one that gets the most messages (and almost all of the spam).
- Make your password for your personal email box and your shopping email box very strong. Your information email password can be weaker.
- Keep your email contact information on your personal email box only.
- Passwords for web sites that contain your personal information (E.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, your blog, etc.) should be extremely strong.
- Banking and Financial Sites: Make the passwords you use as strong as you can. This is your money! Protect it!!
On Your Phone:
- You may want to password protect access to your phone. Your contacts, phone records, etc. are on it and phones do get lost.
- Do not include account information, passwords, etc. in your contact information.
