The new technological age has brought many benefits to everyday life, being able to order what we want from our home and have it delivered without lifting a finger, arranging appointments, and making oversees calls with ease; but it has also opened us up to a new form of vulnerability we haven’t experienced before – the digital kind.

Having everything at our fingerprints has meant that all out delicate information is also saved in digital spaces, that are often the target of malicious hackers. Identity theft is becoming an increasingly common crime and one that doesn’t discriminate amongst people, you can do a lot of things with a clean identity online, causing enormous problems for the victims.

Nowadays we can have our bank cards, documents and more stolen without a physical crime happening. That means we have to be more vigilant of our online habits, creating safety barriers between you and the digital criminals.

This counts whether you are very active online, social media savvy, bloggers, a casual andar bahar player, or just a person looking to buy a special gift, everyone is safer with a few, simple rules and tools for protection:

Use multiple identities

In the same way, you may have a professional email and a personal one, you can create different profiles to serve various purposes, with different degrees of information available in each and increasing levels of security. This way you can be active in whatever online activity you choose without exposing all your information.

• Primary profile: for official purposes, the one will contain important information so you should keep this for dealing with government, banks and the like. Never share this ID with any other services
• Secondary profile: for the rest of your real-life needs, bills, landlines, cable and other things where you might need to put on an email address.
• Social profile: here’s a really important thing to remember You should never link your social media to a bank account or anything sensitive. Also is you can keep it in a private setting. This ID is for login into social media and nothing else.
• For everything else: This ID is for when you want to subscribe to get free stuff, for websites that ask for an email to view and anything that you don’t really want to have an actual tie to. This is an email you can delete anytime without affecting your digital life elsewhere.

Passphrases

It is a must to have different passwords for all accounts, and those passwords should actually be phrases, random and not easy to crack. To keep track of your passphrases uses passwords managers. It might seem overwhelming but it is one of the pillars of identity protection online and once you get used to the passwords managers it becomes second nature, keeping your information a lot safer.

Use two-factor authentification

Since a good password and different ID are sometimes not strong enough on their own, it serves to have another form of identification as part of the process. This allows for safety measures to be taken two times before anyone can access your account, it is one more way to be safe, so it is definitely recommended for all your logins.

Habits to keep

This one is just a summarised number of things that help keep your identity safe

• Avoid using public wifi networks
• Use antivirus software
• Don’t publish personal information on social media
• Never share delicate information on an email
• Be alert about your bank statements and movements
• Use internet browsing tools to protect you while you are online
• Avoid unknown, amateur looking websites

Stay Alert and Informed

Stay in touch with tech news, since they usually warned about the latest threats, and inform the public on the best ways to protect themselves.

Technology has changed the world, so protection has also changed, and so must we.