gPrivacy Awareness Week is May 3-9, and to raise awareness of the importance of protecting personal information and help Australians keep their data private, the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association (AMTA) has the following five tips:
Be conscious of what you share on social media
Having access to social media via our mobile devices 24/7 makes it easy to share our every move. It’s important to be wary of uploading personal details to your social media account, such as sharing location geotagged photos taken at your home or sharing images of your home. A good rule of thumb is to make your profile private and if you wouldn’t share the information with someone in a physical interaction, think again before sharing it on social media.
Erase personal information off previous devices
Before selling, giving away, or trading in a phone that you no longer use, make sure that your data is completely erased by using your phone’s ‘Erase all Content and Settings – Factory Reset’ feature.
Using this feature will remove all your personal data from your device including messages, contacts, photographs, browsing history, Wi-Fi codes, passwords, and any apps you’ve installed.
Before you factor reset back up your old device and transfer your favourite photos and memories to your new device or to cloud backup for safe keeping.
Review your app permissions
When you install a new app, it’s common for it to ask for certain permissions. App permissions are the privileges an app has, like having access to your phone’s camera, location, or your contact list. But not every app needs to access permissions for everything, an example of this would be a music app requesting permission to view your location. Take notice of the apps that request access to data that isn’t relevant to its function and think about whether it’s actually necessary.
Secure your social media accounts
Most apps and websites that you use gather data from you, especially once you log in. When you create a new account using your Facebook login, such as for a music streaming service or online dating, these apps and websites can request access to information on your profile. To protect your private information ongoing, it’s important to regularly log into your Facebook account to review which apps, games, quizzes and websites you’ve allowed access to.
Separate your work and personal devices
While it may seem inconvenient to switch back and forth between multiple devices, one of the key challenges people face is protecting sensitive corporate data. The more work programs and software that you install on your personal devices, like your mobile phone, the higher chance you have of facing vulnerabilities.
Where possible, it’s best to keep your main work device and main personal device separate, or at the very least ensure that your IT team puts strong security measures in place on your personal device if you are using it for work to reduce the chance of any cybersecurity complications.
section – Erase personal information off previous devices Last sentence, Backup should be multiple copies to separate offline storage media, with the offline storage media stored in separate locations. Anything less is NOT a real and proper backup.
section – Review your app permissions Overlooks device manufacturer restrictions on controlling app permissions and/or being able to disable apps, for manufacturer pre-installed bloatware.
section – Secure your social media accountsWhat you describe here is how to do social media INSECURITY.
To keep social media logins secure, you DO NOT EVER allow cross platform social media login, for any reason, at all.
Something really loused up the formatting of my comment. A bunch of linebreaks in it went missing.