Big Brother is the new watchword..not Big Data

Increasing online presence of individuals, both as a matter of social habit, as well as due to commercial compulsions have opened up an unexpected Pandora’s box.  Inadvertently (and sometimes deliberately), a lot of our personal information is posted in electronic formats which are readily available for others to view, or manipulate not fully realizing the consequences of our action.

In an age where even Governments machineries are willing to peak into our personal world’s our continued use of the electronic media only makes us that much more vulnerable. While the electronic world has become a vital component of our daily life, sometimes we over indulge in it and unknowingly provide free fodder for the information kleptomaniacs out there. This information could be as simple as the location where are you to what you are going to this weekend or what all you shop. So it’s always better to know where to actually draw the line of making available personal/professional information on electronic media. Here are a few tips which could be useful:

1. First things first, be clear about the purpose of your transaction or post and reason it to yourself whether it is a personal or a professional interest.
2. Check out the information "visibility ". Is it open to friends or friends of friends or to the entire public? It is always better to have separate email for managing personal information and another one for public transactions.
3. Be aware that mentioning personal information, such as your phone numbers, place of work visible to the public make it vulnerable for this information to be misused by others.
4. Online transactions from public access sites are always prone to problems and can be avoided as much as is possible.
5. Online forms which require you to give information typically ask for much more information than is required.  When you provide information online, question yourself whether this information is absolutely essential to provide; fill in only mandatory information.
6. Maintaining multiple passwords is a challenge.  Yet, changing passwords at least once in 2-3 months would ensure that data theft does not happen. Rely on good old pen and paper for keeping a track of passwords.
7. Some e-commerce sites allow you to access their websites by logging in through any of the other social media logins (such as Facebook) that you may have. Be cognizant of what information they are going to take when they actually allow you to login through Facebook. While it is convenient to login through Facebook, be aware of what you actually tell them about yourself; un-check any info that you do not want to divulge to them.
8. Unless to a closed group, do not post your views, especially if you consider that they could be seen as radical.  The same goes for pictures and photographs of your home, or the place where you stay in, or photographs of your kids/friends/acquaintances in social networking sites.
9. Review the sites that you access periodically.  Unregister from the sites which you had registered, but no longer use.
10. Be aware of the kind of documents and other information that you save in public storage sites like DropBox, Google Drive, etc. These could be easily accessed by others.
11. Many applications that we download on mobile access data on your devices.  Be aware of the data being sent from your phone to online data storage sites which back up your device data.
12. Last but not the least; do not accept friendship requests from strangers. Social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, or Linkedin) thrive on getting you ‘linked’ to as many people as possible. The more people you are connected to, the more you propagate your information, and the more popular you tend to become.  Linking to strangers just for the sake of improving your network is the most dangerous thing that you could do. Instead, go out and socialize.

(Thanks to Raghu and Pavani for helping with this compilation)