“How to I gurantee my privacy?” and “How do I safeguard my information?” are two of the most common questions I receive in my social media classes. I wish I had a simple answer.
The truth is that the best we can do is, well, our best. There’s no foolproof method to make sure you’re never hacked. And there’s no guarantee it’ll never happen to you or one of your accounts.
However, there are some things you can do to make it… no quite so easy for others to hack you.
Check out this post, “10 Online Privacy Tips for Librarians,” from iLibrarian.
Of particular interest is “Beware of Free Public WiFi.”
I found it chilling to discover all of the ways that people could access your information when you’re using free public wifi. Using free programs such as the Firefox extension Firesheep, people with absolutely no hacking skill at all can see which unsecure sites (some of which include Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr) you’re logging into and simply click to access your account by hijacking the login information you’ve entered. (For more read: How to Hijack Facebook Using Firesheep). And unfortunately this isn’t the only program out there. From now on I will be more careful about what I access via public wifi and I certainly won’t be logging into anything.
To this list I would also add don’t make all your passwords the same word. If one account gets hacked, they’ll have the password for all of them.
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