privacy

Today, we are practically online all the time.Security has hence become hygiene for us. We need to have the safety of experts without having to be experts ourselves.

Although the onus towards building secure environment lie on companies that build user-centric products. There are quite few things users can do at their end which pay off high returns within the longer run. very similar to most good habits, the shortage of those practices has far more pronounced downside than the observable upside of exercising these. At the simplest you'll use the products as they're without losing anything that belongs to you, at the worst you lost everything including your identity.


Here are five pointers for users to create sustainably secure environments amid COVID-19 lockdown:

1. Frugality in permissions

Applications often have the tendency to invite permissions beyond what they require.

Users should take care around such permissions by disallowing all unnecessary ones.

In fact, in 2020, applications posing for permissions that do not add up aren't exactly trusted or much used for that matter.

2. Update products

For products like browsers, messaging apps that users use a day and depend tons on, users should be within the habit of updating them regularly to their latest versions.

Teams behind such products are typically performing on security patches for vulnerabilities they discover round the clock.

3. Smaller digital footprint

Your digital footprint is actually the quantity of identifiable data we leave behind on the varied products we use online.

Reducing that, means releasing lesser information to strangers.

Everyday we share locations, signup to services, give mastercard info etc to new services.

These actions happen numerous times through the week that the sheer probability of 1 of them backfiring for us is considerable.

Like most habits, exercising control on this is often something we should always act on atomically.

It's easier to consider whenever you share some data with a replacement service, than to dig out everything you've shared over a period of your time to a mess of products.

4. Using Social Signups

When given an option of signing up to a service that's new you, check for social signups via established products like Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.

This allows limiting security vulnerabilities to one point of failure which is heavily backed by teams supporting many customers online on products which have abundant resources backing their own security.

It's easier to trust Gmail than to trust a longtime chain of hotels whose prime concern isn't tech or security.


However, it is often knowing think before you click; it's hard to undo mistakes within the digital realm.