How to keep yourself safe on personal websites
Just stop for a moment and think about all of the personal websites and apps you regularly access or where you have an account set up.
There are social media sites like Instagram and Facebook. Then there are the sites you regularly use for shopping like eBay, Amazon or the supermarkets. Don’t forget the fitness apps like Strava or the travel sites like booking.com and Airbnb.
If you sat down and wrote a list of every online account you have, it would probably be a long list!
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Taking shortcuts for an easy life
As humans, we like to make life easier for ourselves, and one way in which we do this is always using our business email address to register for these websites. To make things even easier, we often choose the same passwords for all these sites – and everything else we do online.
We might choose the same password for our online shopping as we do for our corporate email account, for example. It’s hard to remember lots of passwords and doing this stops us having to click on ‘forgotten your email address’ and change it each time!
Now here’s the problem. Websites get hacked and we have no control whatsoever if they do – there is nothing we can do to prevent our favourite personal websites getting hacked.
If you have used your business email and the same password to register for a website then if it’s hacked, the hackers may have the keys to your digital life.
What you can do
There are lots of things you can do to protect all of your apps like 2 Factor Authorisation (2FA) and strong passwords.
But one big tip I can give you is not to mix business with pleasure. Keep your personal apps – well personal.
Create a personal email address using Gmail and use that for anything personal you do online, always securing this with 2FA and a strong unique password.
Then use your business email address only for business-related things.
That way, if you hear that your favourite shopping app has been hacked you don’t have to start changing all of your business passwords.
If you’d like to chat this through, or if you have any thoughts of your own to add, please get in touch!
