Ways to Protect Your Privacy

        As we as a culture are talking more and more about digital privacy, we need to stay informed. It's important to know what your options are, especially without having to completely delete your Facebook or Twitter account simply out of fear of your information being leaked to some third party. Here are some practical ways to protect your personal information.

1. Check Your Privacy Settings on Current Social Media Accounts

        Many times, we sign up for an account on a website or take a quiz on Facebook without checking to see what kinds of information are being acquired by those sites. An easy way to check this is to go into your privacy settings and determine what your account is seen publicly. Specifically with Facebook, you can go into the Ads tab of settings and see how much information is being gleaned in order to target you with ads. 

2. Use a More Protected Browser

        Maybe you don't want to go to all the trouble of going through all of your social media accounts and figuring out what your privacy settings are. Thankfully, some developers have already made it easier for us by providing browsers with built-in content blockers and privacy enhancers. One such browser specifically for mobile devices is Firefox Focus, which not only improves privacy, but also improves performance by limiting what is loaded when you open a web page and by choosing not to save passwords and browsing history. Other browsers and extensions have similar capabilities.

3. Be Smart

        My final advice is simple: be smart! I believe a lot of us grew up without really worrying about what we put on the internet because we didn't feel like there was much risk; however, nowadays you can never be too careful. I'm not saying all of this to make you feel paranoid because the internet is still an incredibly useful tool and resource, but I still believe we ought to pay attention to what we share about ourselves. So, be smart!