3 Little-known tips to protect your privacy on the web

In the new age of IT, personal information has become such a valuable commodity that is being captured, compiled, bought and sold in ways most of us couldn’t possibly imagine. Companies have even formed solely to collect and sell sensitive information – like medical records, personal shopping habits, and credit histories – to anyone willing to buy it!

And as banks, businesses, and even cultural institutions begin to open their ‘online offices’, the confidentiality of our communications, papers, and personal information is increasingly at risk. Here’s how to protect yourself…

1. Are you shedding personal information without even knowing it?
Remove your email address and name from your browser’s ‘Setup’, ‘Options’ and ‘Preferences’ menus. When you’re online your browser can give away your email address and name, and this can be used by con-artists and marketers. So replace it with a different email address instead. You can obtain a free of charge email address from, www.hotmail.com.  And protect your real identity when surfing by entering a pseudonym in the same browser menus.

2. Don’t let marketers spy on you – turn on cookie notices in your browser
All the sites you visit can store data (‘cookies’) on your computer’s hard drive. These cookies contain your user IDs and passwords to those sites, and enable you to access them more quickly. But they can also be used by unscrupulous sites to trawl for data; tracking where you go, and what you look at. And this data can be used to create a profile about you for marketers. So open your Internet browser. Go to ‘Tools, Options: Security’. Press the ‘Custom Level’ button. Select the prompt for the cookie options. Now each time a website tries to place a cookie on your hard drive, you’ll receive a warning. Only accept temporary cookies from trusted websites, and reject non-temporary cookies and/or those from sites with no privacy statements.

3. Clear your memory cache after browsing
After you browse the Internet, copies of all accessed pages and images are saved on your computer’s memory.  You can delete any ‘online trail’ by going  to ‘Internet Options’ from the ‘Tools’ menu and click on ‘Clear History’ (this is if you use Internet Explorer). If you use another browser go to the ‘Preferences’ folder in your browser and click on the ‘Empty Cache’ button.

We live in an ever-changing, ever-advancing world; and if you don’t keep up with the latest scamster tactics you could find yourself being taken advantage of. So empower and protect yourself today and put an end to Internet peeping toms!