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How To Protect Your Digital Identity: While the country is swiftly heading towards owning a dominant digital space with its ‘Digital India’ campaign, the percentage of cyber crimes is also increasing every year. In a scenario where India registered around 52,974 cyber crime cases in 2021 (as per the recently released NCRB 2021 report) which is an increase of over 5 per cent from 2020 and over 15 per cent from 2019, maintaining one’s digital identity and protecting it from hackers and intruders has become important now more than ever.
It seems easy to think that once your posts and accounts are vanished from the screen, it is gone for good. However, the truth is that if a person has been “online” ever, which means if one has ever owned an email account, used an app or done anything ‘smart’ — then the digital footprints remain, nothing ever goes off internet. The only thing that you can do is maintain and try to control to leave as small amount of remnants as possible.
Think of the oldest email, social media or shopping app account that had ever created and press Shift+Delete on it. From the very first cringy email ID on Yahoo or Rediffmail or some random shopping account that you no never really used, everything that is not in use needs to be deleted. Some of the websites and apps that can come in handy include AccountKiller.com or JustDeleteMe which tells you how easy/hard/impossible it is to delete popular accounts that you may have created once upon a time.
Haveibeenpwned is a great tool to check whether your data has ever been hacked. If your data has been leaked then chances are that some part of your digital identity will always be online. But what you can do is check what accounts have been compromised and then get down to deleting them.
Yes in the initial days of the first decade of this century social media was a cool place to share almost everything, all those embarrassing tweets and cringeworthy Facebook posts. If they are still lurking somewhere then they must be deleted. Twitter doesn’t allow you to bulk delete your old tweets but there are third-party services/apps that can do it for you. On Facebook, you can go to “Settings & Privacy” and then head to “Activity log” and delete those less-said-the-better kinds of posts. The point of this being is if someone searches you on Google, then images, and posts from Facebook will pop up, so it’s better to junk them if you want to.
As efforts to outmaneuver identity thieves evolve, so do the thieves’ tactics. One way to help combat this is to make sure the security software, operating system, browsers and apps on your computer and smartphone are up to date. This may help protect your devices against potential identity thieves who try to take advantage of bugs or security holes in outdated software, systems or browsers.
The best way to keep all the important documents, files and photographs is to keep them off internet. Backing up your computer data to an external hard drive or printing off your most important files is a way to keep a backup in case your digital copies are compromised. Be sure to store the drive or hard copies in a fireproof safe or safe deposit box.
Choose browsers, search engines, and apps that aren’t data-hungry or are always lurking in the background. Stay cautious while mindlessly pressing that ” Yes, I accept” button that we so easily put a tick on without reading the terms. Keep a track of all your shopping apps and software accounts. The best practise is to share as little as possible and not be careless with your data. Stay vigilant, stay safe.
The way to be on internet is to be guarded, prudent with your important data. But that doesn’t mean you cannot have fun on the internet. The game is to share more while sharing less!
