How to Protect your Personal Information Online

TechsPlace | Mark Zuckerberg’s recent testimony regarding privacy policy of Facebook has sparked a fire among the users. And the most important question that has come up from the situation is ‘is our personal data safe’? Well, even when the world could be blaming Facebook for misusing personal and confidential data, Facebook is not entirely to be blamed here. The devices we have are in our control, right? And even with the latest versions of iOS and Android, users can now control their data better with permissions, which are more advanced in case of Android smartphones. So what is it that we are doing wrong? Are there some ways we can protect our personal data?

Yes, there certainly are! And here are some of them:

Prefer signing up with Email or Mobile number

The list of achievements by mobile app development companies has made it easier for us to sign up with the social login feature. To sign up with an app through social login feature, all it takes is two taps. Usually the platforms that are used to sign up with personal information are Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter. However, the other side of this convenient feature is that it draws your personal information. If you really don’t want to risk your personal information, mobile or email login may take a minute more than the social login, but at least you can be sure about your data being safe.

Check App Permissions

When it comes to keeping a check on permissions, both iOS and Android app development companies make sure their app permissions can be controlled by users. This is the reason why most of the developers make sure their apps are configured to use different pieces of hardware and features of the phone, and can work even with limited permissions. Now your job is to make optimum use of these permissions. For example – if you don’t use the live video broadcast feature of Facebook, but upload pictures with the in-built camera in the Facebook app, you may consider turning off the microphone permission. Turning it off would sure your microphone is not being used to record audio while you are unaware of it, as few days back, the hoax that Facebook uses your microphone to record your audio all the time was in the air and it caused a lot of people to uninstall the app, whereas the solution could have simply been restricting the microphone with permissions.

Turn on Auto-update

Mobile app developers keep an eye out for functional or security cracks in their app and tend to fix it as soon as possible. Most of us see updates as something that would change the look and feel of the app, and when we don’t find that in the ‘What’s new’ section of the Play Store, we choose not to update the app. What we miss is that, sometimes the update is a security patch, which, some or the other way, has been designed to protect your phone data, including personal data. The best way to keep up with the security updates is to turn on the auto update feature in the app. This way, your smartphone will have the latest, up-to-date apps with security features and even fixes for latest data leak bugs.

Download apps only from authorized stores

There is a huge number of websites around the world that offer mobile applications just like Google Play Store and App Store. However, the major issue with these app stores is that they are not authorized by Google or Apple, and hence, there is simply no credibility involved in trading with these app stores. As a result, even the most popular apps like WhatsApp, Facebook, and others, can also be attached with codes that extract your personal data with utmost secrecy, and may even export your bank, user identification details and other sensitive information without your permission. We explained this with detail because we want you to understand how most of the users are concerned only about the ‘.apk’ file and the version of it, and not about the source of the application. But when it comes to security, source of the application matters big time. In a nutshell, download only from the official application stores.