Digital privacy or online privacy means how much of your browsing data remains private when you’re online. This is a huge cause for concern with browning history and personal data being at the risk of being tampered with. Most people underestimate the real importance of digital privacy not just on social media platforms but also on your browsing history. Know more at bysafeonline.com.
Why is online privacy important?
Some things can be shared and things that you would rather not share with strangers.
You can change the settings of your social media account and share your data with a limited number of trusted people. However, you don’t know how social media uses the information that you share and then there are also these other factors such as browsing history, purchases, or even online correspondence.
What is information privacy?
Information privacy or data privacy is a branch of data security that deals with the proper handling of your private data. This includes consent, notice, and regulatory obligations. In simple terms, it is the ability to control what personal information you share on the internet and who has access to it.
Data privacy simply refers to
● Online privacy
● Financial privacy and
● Medical privacy
Some methods used to limit the sharing of your personal information online include data masking, encryption, and authentication that make sure your personal information is available only to authorized parties.
How digital privacy and information security differ?
Digital privacy and online security are closely related aspects that relate to your cyber safety.
Digital Privacy is the proper usage handling and processing of personal information
Information security is protecting personal data from malicious attacks and unauthorized access.
Important internet privacy issues
Internet privacy issues include everything from data you don’t mind sharing to annoying exchanges such as targeted ads, public embarrassment or a breach of privacy that could in some ways affect your personal life.
User tracking by search engines
Search engines do not just save information related to things you’ve been looking for on the internet. They also keep track of the websites you have visited after that. If your search engine provider is also your browser, they get to save all your browsing history as well.
Search engines usually collect
Search history
Cookies
IP addresses and
Click through history
All this information is generally used to create a customer persona based on their browsing habits. Among many other things, this is a practice used for personalizing ads, etc.
This kind of profiling becomes a major issue when data matching algorithms associate someone’s customer persona with personally identifiable information. This can lead to data breaches.
Data harvesting by social media
A good example of data breaches is that associated with Facebook. It exposed sensitive information and personal data of 533 million users. This meant an unwanted sharing of full names, phone numbers, locations, birthdates, bios and also email addresses.
Online tracking through cookies
Cookies are usually more helpful than harmful. They collect your browsing information and then allow websites to remember your login details, language preferences, and other such details.
Identity theft
Online identity theft refers to someone getting hold of your personally identifiable information to commit fraud. To get this information they use tricks such as Phishing, Malware, and Pharming.
Conclusion
Hackers and con artists use various methods to steal your data. They may not be obvious at first sight. To secure yourself it is best to use good antivirus software on your device irrespective of whether it is a computer or mobile.
