In the current digital era the privacy is very crucial and at the same time it’s very difficult to protect the privacy. One of the simplest strategy is to not participate in the digital world however it’s no longer an option because the current trend is only gonna create more opportunities and opting out would mean missing out on these opportunities.

The issue with the current timeline is that most of the people are not even aware of the implications of the online digital privacy. Unlike the past technology where the communication was mostly one directional the current technology empowers people do you have a bidirectional communication. This also opens up door for the bad actors to hack the critical information and misuse it in any possible way. It’s not a surprise that in the past couple decades the digital information have been leveraged to blackmail and extortion. This becomes critical when the privacy of the lawmakers are exposed to these extortionist.

While most of the people are not in a position to make critical decision which will impact millions of people, we still will make choices which effect lives of people in our life. This is where it’s important to not only learn the basics of how the digital world works but also to equip ourselves with the strategies to mitigate any privacy vulnerabilities.

I believe that the baseline should be to be vigilant of any or all the data which we post online, in fact I would even go a step further and say that we have to be vigilant about any websites we come across because there might be circumstances that our devices could download some sort of malware in the backend which would be actively feeding the data without our knowledge. As a consumer I think one of the best thing we can do is to leverage a VPN solution which acts as a wall between our devices and the Internet and approach every digital interaction as a zero trust. Keep in mind that our data may not be an accurate representation of us as an individual, but it’s the closest it can get. The companies who harvest on our data uses machine learning and data management to understand our conscious and sub-conscious patterns to create a targeted ad. Whenever I encounter any attractive ad, I simply open a incognito browser to look up for that product instead of clicking it within the app. This will prevent the app from targeting me in the future.

To summarize,

• Use VPN if possible
• Use private browsing while using browsers, I use Braves browser which is security and privacy focused.
• Disable app tracking, some social media apps are notorious about this
• Use personalized encryption to set unique password for every account without needing to remember the passwords itself. Check out my post on this : https://www.linkedin.com/posts/vineetloya_passwordprotection-howto-privacy-activity-6636859235323957248-pFqk and https://www.linkedin.com/posts/vineetloya_security-privacy-datasecurity-activity-6636863466399428608-IMxp
• Be mindful of your digital interaction

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