What each of us can do to prevent our personal data theft

 With smart phones, laptops, social media and the armies of attention engineers employed by the tech firms, we have willingly become digital slaves sacrificing our privacy and personal data to avail services and convenience online. Some of us have unfortunately seen our identities misused/abused, our financial data compromised and much worse. What can each of us do personally to reduce the above risks ? ( This is a living list that gets updated as more ideas are collated. )

1. Use Google Takeout to export all your personal data from google accounts ( photos, drive, gmail etc) to your personal local computer/drives.
2. Once the above step is done, disable all ‘’auto upload settings’ of your data to Google /iCloud etc from your mobile phone/laptop/PC and other devices . Ensure this is done for all devices used by your family members. And then delete all this data on Google/icloud etc.
3. Create a mail account ( without any personal identifiers e.g. xyz12344@gmail.com ) and use this for all newsletter subscriptions/online services etc which could be potentially used by spammers/promotions etc.
4. Check and ensure that none of your online accounts contain personal financial information, passwords, personal identifiers etc.
5. Search for large mails ( mails with large attachments ) in your gmail account. Most of these big attachments contain data that would be personal and sensitive. Remove all such mails with big attachments from your mail accounts to reduce risk.
6. A simple cost effective way to manage your personal data is to have two pocket drives which act as back up to each other. You can get a 4Tb pocket drive on Amazon for Rs8k and use simple tools such as Free file sync to setup an automatic backup between these drives to update files between the drives at a frequency.
7. If you want the convenience of being able to share documents like Google Drive links, consider a costlier private cloud option with devices called Network Attached Storage devices ( NAS). One example is Synology.Such devices are connected to your home wifi network and will have storage drives ( which are expandable/stackable). Data that you back up on these drives can be accessed remotely from any device thru link sharing/apps etc. DO NOT DO A CLOUD BACK UP of your personal data on vendor’s cloud, no matter how secure they claim it to be. With such a setup, you can access your data anywhere on any device and share data with people you trust, WITHOUT STORING YOUR DATA ON ANY VENDOR’s CLOUD.
8. Do not submit any personal information on any online or offline forms/ raffle forms. These are magnets for data theft.
9. It is worthwhile to have two mobile SIMs , with one SIM exclusively for personal contacts. Also be ruthless in not installing/removing apps that can be potential data hacks . With finger print scanners and our indiscriminate allowing of apps to our mobile data, it does not take much for them to impersonate you on your personal finance/banking apps by reading your finger print data and the OTP.
10. By the same logic, avoid any financial app that does not authenticate you in atleast two ways before allowing data access/transactions.
11. No sharing of personal data/OTP/financial information on phone to anyone.