Know the important Data Privacy tips for consumers
As a customer, you must anticipate that your personal information is not completely secure when you use the internet. Every day, hackers commit data breaches, revealing our email addresses, passwords, credit card numbers, social security numbers, and other personal information. Most individuals don’t realize how severe this is until they are personally impacted by fraudulent conduct, such as an attempt to make an illicit purchase using their personal information. The alarming reality is that this form of crime is on the rise, with one researcher estimating that a new victim of identity theft occurs every two seconds in the United States alone. According to Experian, people’s identities are taken in 31 percent of data breaches. This is particularly concerning when you consider that over 870 million data were hacked in January 2021 alone.
Data leaks are unavoidable in today’s world. To participate in today’s society, we must create online accounts and accept the fact that the centralized databases containing our personal information will be breached at some point. Consumers should also keep in mind that just because their credit card numbers or passwords were not stolen for immediate use in cybercrime does not mean they were not the victims of a data breach. Hackers can only take data that is readily available to them. According to Imperva’s report Lessons Learned from Analyzing 100 Data Breaches, 75 percent of the stolen data is personal information, compared to only 15 percent for credentials and only 10% for credit card information. While credentials and credit card numbers provide instant value to hackers, your personal information has the greatest long-term worth, and it can be sold again with no risk.
Here are five ways to make it more difficult for hackers to steal and sell your personal information:
- You should keep the information you disclose on social media to a minimum. According to a recent study, 70% of job recruiters reject candidates based on information discovered online. Recruiters, on the other hand, respond to a strong, favorable personal brand online.
- Apps should be used with caution. Information about you, such as your favorite games, contacts, shopping habits, and location, has worth – just like money. Consider who receives that information and how it’s gathered through apps.
- Learn how to control your privacy settings and say no to data collection or sharing by apps.
- To protect your devices, use strong passwords, passcodes, or touch ID features. If your gadgets are lost or stolen, these security precautions can help protect your information.
- With a few exceptions, such as where the data must be preserved to comply with other requirements, many data privacy laws allow you to request that a corporation delete all of the information it has acquired about you. You also have the right to get a copy of your personal data from any firm that holds it, so that you may understand how and why organizations use your data and ensure that they are doing so legally.
- None of these strategies can completely protect you from being a victim of a data breach, but they can help.