Five Data Privacy Tips for Consumers

As a consumer, you must assume that your personal information is not 100% safe online. Hackers cause data breaches every single day, exposing our email addresses, passwords, credit card numbers, social security numbers and other sensitive personal data in the process. Most people don’t think about how serious this is until they are affected personally through malicious activity, such as an attempted unauthorized purchase using their information. The disturbing fact is this type of crime is exploding, and according to one study there is a new victim of identity theft every 2 seconds in the United States alone. Experian reports that in 31% of data breaches, people later have their identity stolen. When you consider that in January 2021 alone, more than 870 million records were compromised, this is pretty alarming.

Data breaches are an unavoidable part of modern life. We have to register for online accounts in order to participate in today’s society and have to accept the fact that the centralized databases containing our information will sooner or later suffer a breach. Consumers must also consider that just because their credit card numbers or passwords have not been stolen for immediate use in cybercrime does not mean they were not victims of a data privacy breach. Hackers can only steal data that is available for them to take. Imperva’s report Lessons Learned from Analyzing 100 Data Breaches revealed that 75% of the stolen data is personal data versus just 15% where credentials are being stolen and just 10% where credit card details were stolen. While credentials and credit card details deliver immediate value to hackers, your personal data offers the most long-term value and they can sell it over and over with very little risk.

Here are five ways you can make yourself a harder target for hackers looking to steal and sell your personal data:

1. Limit the information you share on social media. Recent research found that 70 percent of job recruiters rejected candidates based on information they found online. At the same time, recruiters do respond to a strong, positive personal brand online.
2. Be careful with apps. Information about you, such as the games you like to play, your contacts list, where you shop, and your location, has value – just like money. Be thoughtful about who gets that information and how it’s collected through apps.
3. Learn to manage your privacy settings and say no to app tracking or data sharing.
4. Use strong passphrases, passcodes, or touch ID features to lock your devices. These security measures can help protect your information if your devices are lost or stolen.
5. Many data privacy laws entitle you to request that a company delete all the information it has collected about you, with a few exceptions such as where the data needs to be retained to comply with other requirements. You also have the right to get a copy of your personal data from any company that has it so you can understand how and why organizations are using your data, and check they are doing it lawfully.

None of these tactics will make you 100% immune to being the victim of a data breach, but you can follow these simple tips to mitigate the damage.