So February was supposed to be where I learned some automation, but the Raspberry pi platform has been giving me some trouble, so I don’t think I’ll quite have that mastered by the end of the month. I have however started learning a little about cyber security and thought I could share a few easy steps with you to help protect your personal data.

EVEN IF YOU TRUST THEM
Personally, I don’t like anybody knowing any of my personal information, especially the government with their increasing mass surveillance and ever expanding list of laws and regulations. BUT, even for those of you who support the “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” mentality, consider this; you may trust the government, or Target, Home Depot, Amazon, or JP Morgan, to never do anything it wasn’t supposed to, but in the last several years there have been multiple highly publicized  hacks of vast amounts of personal data from companies like Home Depot, and the Federal Government.  Well-meaning companies, in addition to the government, collect and store vast amounts of data on their users which are prone to security breaches by people who want to steal your SSN or credit card accounts.

Even without worries over security breaches, there is the “creep factor” that companies like Target use their massive stores of data to predict major life events, like a woman’s pregnancy, accurate to within a two week delivery date so she will buy more from Target, before she’s told anyone else, including her parents.  Even if you have “nothing to hide”, you wouldn’t want somebody knowing when you go to the bathroom or have an intimate moment with your partner, would you?

WHERE TO START, HOW TO THINK
This is where we get into the basics. Before you start looking for encryption services or apps, the most important thing to consider when implementing privacy online is how they make their money, because nothing is truly free. Even if someone developed a great program or service for free, it still costs money to maintain servers, hard drives, and security to protect it from being hacked. Do you pay for their services, or do they cover costs with grants and donations? If not, then you are their product, not their customer.

Companies like Google and Facebook, which offer services for free to billions of people, need to pay for their infrastructure and employees salaries, even if they were non profit (they aren’t). They do this by collecting absurd amounts of data on their users and selling it as highly specified and highly efficient advertising to other companies (read Target story above). Ever wonder how something you looked at on Amazon shows up on Facebook two weeks later? Now you know. Even if you don’t use security/privacy services, this is an important fact to realize.

BASIC STEPS
Be aware of what photos you post anywhere online, and realize that smart phones and cameras now embed the location the photo was taken into the file. This means someone can extract your home address, where you work, or what gym you go to, even if you go to great lengths to avoid details in your pictures like a street sign or house number.

Whenever possible, pay with cash. I’m guilty of it, I know plastic is easier, but every little purchase you make tells the world where you are at any point in the day, and what you like to buy. It allows strangers to determine your habits, helping them to predict where you are going to be, when you won’t be home, or what you are willing to buy.

A simple yet vastly overlooked non Internet-specific security precaution to consider is telegraphing personal life details in your day-to-day activities. “My child is an honor student” bumper stickers tells strangers where your kid goes to school and approximate age. School/sport team clothing lets strangers know where they can find you.  Those stick figure families on the rear car window are excellent for predators assessing the weaknesses of a potential target: single mom or military dad says there likely isn’t an adult male in the house. Kids telegraph the gender and age of the children in the house. No pets mean no animal to alert you of intruders. Kids in sports gear means it’s likely nobody is home in the early afternoons. All they need to do is follow you home.

WHAT NEXT?
This post is more to get you thinking about why you might want to protect your privacy and easy ways to do it. Next time I’ll go into tools and programs you can use to easily increase your security.