Six easy ways to protect your online privacy

As on-the-go professionals who juggle several technology devices that contain your business information, it’s important to protect your devices. Consumer confidence in how you protect their privacy is also key to your online business.

Your personal privacy on the web may be less secure than you think. Web browsing habits are tracked, search engines routinely change their privacy policies, and there are always challenges to Web privacy by businesses.

In addition to protecting our computers, we now have to protect our smartphones and other mobile devices.

Forbes recently highlighted several ways to protect your privacy online, including:

1. Clear your browser history: Change your browser settings so that your search history and cookies are automatically cleared out after every session, and the amount you’re tracked online is lessened. To do this, in your browser’s “options” tab go to “privacy.” Select “never remember your history.”
2. Sign out of online accounts: Sign out of all online accounts when you’re finished using them. Not only will this slightly reduce the amount of tracking of you as you surf the web, this prevents someone from accessing your information.
3. Add encryption to your computer: This would require you to use a password or encryption key to access the computer’s hard drive information. On a Mac, go to settings and choose “Security and Privacy,” then “FileVault,” and select “Turn on Filevault.” For PCs, select Bitlocker.
4. Use two-step authentication in Gmail: If you have a Gmail account, turn on two-step authentication, which means in order for your Gmail account to be accessed from a new device, a code will be need to sent to your phone. If someone ever gets access to your Gmail password, they’ll never be able to sign into your account from a different computer.
5. Set up Google Alerts: Find out what is being said about you online by entering your name and variations of your name. You’ll receive notices whenever the search engine finds your name or the alerts you set on the Internet. It’s easy to do and takes less than a minute to do.
6. Change Facebook settings: Change your Facebook settings to “Friends Only.” Visit your privacy settings and make sure the “default privacy” setting isn’t set to public.