Vital Data Privacy Facts on Data Privacy Day

Data Privacy Day is on January 28^th and is an international effort to help businesses and individuals safeguard their online data and information. Learn more about data privacy facts and how you can protect your data online. 

Understanding Data Privacy Facts 

Tips for Protecting Your Data Privacy

Home Telecom strives to educate customers about practicing online protection and security. Here are five data privacy tips to help ensure that you stay safe and protected while online.

1. Two-Step Authentication

Two-step authentication adds a second layer of protection beyond just a login and password. Once you login to your account, it will trigger a second verification through a face scan, fingerprint, one-time code or security key. We highly recommend setting this feature up on sites, especially those that contain your financial information.

2. SSL Certificate

When you shop online or enter bank information, it’s vital that a website is secured or hackers can easily steal your information. The easiest way to ensure that the site is secure is to check its SSL certification. If the site starts with https://, it’s not secure. However, if it’s https://, it is. Confirming SSLC certification is easy, so make sure to always check this before entering any personal information. While sites that are not secure are fine to browse, don’t share financial or personal information with websites that are not.

3. Avoid Saving Information

Even though a site says it’s secure, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it can’t be hacked. While it’s convenient to store your personal information on websites, including your credit card number, if you can access this information, it means that hackers can too. Avoid storing your address and credit card information on sites and spend the extra time to enter this each time you make a purchase.

4. Be Careful

Catfishing is an online scam when someone sets up a fake online profile, targeting people to ask for money. In it for the long game, they will try to form a relationship, and it may take them several months before they even ask for money. The average losses for catfishing are extreme - around $15,000 - so never accept friend requests from people you don’t know or send money to someone you have never met in person.

5. Strong Passwords

Never use the same password for every account because if your account is hacked, it gives hackers access to all your accounts.

Consider making your password an entire sentence that is a minimum of 12 characters long and is easy for you to remember. Some websites even allow you to use spaces to make your password even more unique.

Trend Micro™️

Home Telecom offers FREE Trend Micro™️ Internet Security software to all of our High-Speed Internet Customers. This robust software is valued at $89.95 /year and is easy to use and install on your PC. Benefits include:

You can install this software on up to eight PCs, and it is free for as long as you remain a Home Telecom High-Speed Internet customer.

To learn more about Stay Safe Online and Data Privacy Day, visit the site powered by the National Cyber Security Alliance.

• Protects from viruses, spyware, worms, phishing Trojans, rootkits, botnets, fake viruses and more.
• Warns about and blocks unsafe sites before you click on them.
• Finds and blocks malicious links in instant messages, emails or spam.
• Works to boost your Windows Firewall security and validates your Wi-Fi networks and hotspots.
• Notifies you about dangerous links on social media networks.
• Improves PC performance by cleaning up registries, browser history, cookies and temporary files.
• Protects children online by restricting web content and allows parents to set an access schedule.
• Protects data by safeguarding personal information, shreds sensitive data and stores sensitive documents in a password-protected folder, which you can lock if your computer is stolen.

You can install this software on up to eight PCs, and it is free for as long as you remain a Home Telecom High-Speed Internet customer.

To learn more about Stay Safe Online and Data Privacy Day, visit the site powered by the National Cyber Security Alliance.