Happy World Data Privacy Day! A Short Guide to Protecting Your Data

First of all, today is 28 January 2022 “World Data Privacy Day“, or for our readers who are EU citizens, “World Data Protection Day”. As the theme of the day suggests, it is important to protect your data from unauthorized visitors on the web. While providing us with many advancements and ease of life, the digital world is also a place where you must protect your valuable information. And for good measure, below are some rules that can be followed for increasing your security. The classic information is given on data privacy day.

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Standard data privacy day procedures

Most security advice revolve around the trio of “Encrypt. Backup. Protect.” In general, the procedures advise making your data impossible to read, easy to retrieve in bad situations, and as secure as possible to make it hard to get.

1. Encryption: While starting the first part of protection with encrypting your information to protect your data even if it was in someone else’s hands. It will do this by scrambling your data and reassembling it with the decryption key that the program has. While some may think that encryption can only be done by some computer expert, there are many easy-to-use programs in terms of encryption of e-mails, important files, servers, etc.
2. Backup: Backup is a key part of data privacy. Even if you are the best of the best and most digitally secure person out there, someone still figures something out to get your data. Therefore, keeping up backups to recover everything in cloud storage, physical external storage disks, or some form of unreachable storage device is important. Not only the backup itself, but the failsafe plan to recover everything quickly and eradicate the threat is a key point as well. If you do not have one, get one on data privacy day. It is never too late.
3. Protection: Of course, protection is the obvious key point in data security. However, it is the most misunderstood one as well. Just because you have a strong password does not mean that you are protected from threats on the web. It is important to have “layers” if you are talking about security since the most important thing is to have another thing to protect you even though you fail on one part. Firewalls, biometrics, two-layer authorizations, and many other extra layers exist that you can plan.
4. Extra – Be A Digital Citizen: Even though organizations and many highly-protected industries do more than the things I mentioned above, they might fail in protecting the data. The number one reason is attacks that involve “social engineering”. A huge amount of data breaches occur due to human error, which means that most people are not very careful about what they click, run or accept on the web. Try to learn more about distinguishing an attack from genuine information. If you want to start from somewhere, read “Phishing E-mails: How to Distinguish Safe E-mails and the Top 10 Most Imitated Companies“. Start being a conscious digital citizen on data privacy day.

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Some concerns

After all the protection and data security speech, it is important to talk about what the users are accepting on the internet as well. Even though many regulations, policies, and legislations are put into place, most users still agree to provide full data to use the services on the web without reading what they are signing up to. Especially with big tech firms and huge impossible to read terms of use, services, and data privacy agreements; most users skip through the agreements and are not even aware that they are providing their own data with a silver plate. However, there are efforts on making these agreements and terms more readable for users.

So, until we reach that future, try to stay as safe as possible on the web by following simple protection advice. Once again, have a nice world data privacy day. And share data privacy day with people to increase consciousness.