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How to Protect Your Privacy Online

A lot has been said about your privacy online. More and more people are getting victims of phishers, scammers and identity thieves in a range of privacy violations from getting embarrassing status updates put up on their social networking sites, to downright criminal acts like unauthorized use of credit cards and money getting stolen from the victims’ Paypal accounts or online bank accounts.

Here are the top 5 ways to protect your privacy online.

1. It is not limited to social media networks.
When talking about online privacy, social media sites like Facebook and MySpace immediately come to mind. While they are the most prevalent sites that identity thefts and other cyber criminals use to carry out their crimes, they are not the ONLY sites. You could get in trouble using e-mail, backing up your files online, or even through searching.

This is not to say that you should go lax with your privacy on social media sites, it is just the opposite: you should safeguard the personal information you have on your social media sites because they could be used for other sites as well.

To do this, you should use the site’s privacy option, which effectively makes your profiles invisible to people who are outside your contacts list. You be careful on adding people to your contacts list as well. If a stranger asks you to add him or her to your contacts list, think very carefully before you click that approve button.

Further, you should not post private information online, or information that would tell people where you would be at a particular day and time. Nor should you post pictures, blogs, and other content that may be deemed offensive, racist or reveals too much about you or your life that it could be used against you at some later time.

Lastly, do not share personal information online. This includes that of your friends. There may be sites that ask you to refer a page to a friend, and if you like their page, chances are you will input not only your name and contact details, but your friends’ as well. When asked to sign up with your e-mail address, you might want to create a new one for use on these sites, protecting your primary e-mail address.

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Recent years have seen the rise of broadband, the capability of connecting to the Internet at connection speeds of more than 200 kilobits per second, or 1.5 megabits per second (depending on who you ask, the required speeds for broadband vary).

Apart from the faster connections, however, the advent of broadband did away with the tedious task of calling your ISP, waiting for an open line, and logging in before you could surf. Now, you only have to power on your computer and you’re instantly connected. And it has been met with widespread, and even increasing, acceptance. By February 2004, 48 million American homes already had broadband connection at home, representing around 24% of American adults, and signifying a 60% increase in adoption rates from a year earlier. You can only imagine what the adoption rates are currently at.

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