subject: How To Keep Your Data Safe [print this page] Information has always been power and that has not changed. These days people may say that data is valuable, but the expression means the same. So, if your information or your data is so valuable, how can you keep it private? In other words, how can you safeguard yourself and your savings?
The Internet, viruses, scanners, chips, RFID, credit cards and spyware make the job quite difficult, if a criminal wants to get hold of your data. Unfortunately, it is not good enough to hope that a data thief will not choose on you.
Your bank, your insurance company or the government may give your details to them by leaving them on trains, throwing them in skips or leaving them on hard drives in computers which they subsequently sell secondhand on eBay. It occurs several times a year that we hear of, who knows how many times more?
So, what can you do? Well, there are quite a few things that you can do, but the issue is that most people will not implement them until it is too late, hoping that they will not be a victim of data snooping.
The first thing to do is to endeavour to safeguard your data. That sounds obvious, but how do you go about it?
Let's begin with your written name and address. You could notify your local council that you want to be taken off any lists that they pass on to anybody that asks for them. Likewise, you can have your address taken of the junk mail lists and you can have your phone number taken off the junk phone mail list. Ask your local council how to go about this.
You could buy things with a 'post restante' address at your local post office. If need be, explain why to the company you are buying from why you are doing that. Or you could have your mail redirected from one address to another.
For example, if you have a lock-up address, use that address, but pay the post office to re-direct your mail to where you wake up every day. Another idea to try is to modify your name. Add in your middle initial, or your full middle name. Add the suffix 'senior' or 'junior' and keep notes. If you get junk mail with these names, you know who to complain to.
You computer probably contains a great deal of sensitive data and you should protect it, not least because some of that data will be the email addresses of your acquaintances and you do not want to introduce them to thieves, do you? Fortunately, this form of protection is comparatively easy.
Make certain that you use a firewall and anti-virus protection. Use the best you can afford. The best will cost about $50-60 a year. At $1 a week, it is not worth being mean. You can get free software to do the task and some of it is pretty good, but how many times do you want to pick the wrong one?
Then there is your wallet. RFID tags are inserted in most ID cards and credit cards these days and they can be read by the thousands of RFID readers in hotels, hospitals, offices and stores. Consider shielding your wallet, bag or purse or wherever you keep your cards, so that they cannot be read by random RFID readers.
