Conquest Consultancy is today joining more than 1700 organisations across the UK from tech companies, banks and football clubs, to schools, police services and charities in helping promote the safe, responsible and positive use of digital technology through Safer Internet Day.
Whilst everyone is more likely to have a positive experience online than a negative one. Safer Internet Day has been created to make the internet a far more secure and safe environment for everyone. Below are several items we have found that can make your online footprint that little more secure.
Privacy
With more and more of us having social media profiles, this is one area that can be left open to those wishing to impersonate or cause harm. The majority of social media platforms have their default setting to ‘public’, this means that anyone who searches for you can see all of your information and any posts you may have made or commented on. By setting your Facebook profile to show to ‘Friends only’ or your Twitter account to ‘private’ literally only takes a moment but ensures that your social media activity is not being viewed by anyone that you have not given permission to.
Twitter’s Quality Filter
By turning on Twitter’s quality filter you can greatly improve your experience in the twitterspere. After enabling this filter, lower quality tweets such as duplicate tweets or automated content will be removed. This filter can also be used by account origin if, for example, you only wish to see tweets from a particular country.
Email Links
It’s almost as common as those PPI emails, but emails pertaining to be from your bank can prove far more sinister. Please be extremely cautious when receiving such emails as the majority of the time they are not what they seem. By clicking on the name of the sender will open up the full email address of the sender, such as the example below – notice the email has come from Barclay Bank as opposed to Barclays Bank.
It is also worth looking at spelling errors and links that don’t work as they should. The greeting is often a dead giveaway, for example – Dear Customer instead of Dear Mr etc. If you receive any such email we would strongly recommend contacting your bank to ensure that the email is valid. Banks would be far happier that you checked in the first instance than opening up risk.
Passwords
You would have thought that by now people would have become wise to the fact that difficult and varied passwords should be used to protect their online activity but as little time ago as 2016 nearly 17% of people used ‘123456’ as a password to safeguard their accounts. Other passwords that are extremely common are ‘password’ and ‘qwertyuiop’. Rarely a month goes by without there being news of a big data breach somewhere in the world, in fact in 2017 over 10 million passwords were added to the public domain! To ensure that your passwords are as secure as they possibly can be, we strongly recommend that a combination of numbers, special characters along with both upper case and lower case letters are used.
All that said the internet, in the main, has been an unquestionable force for economic and social progress. It’s open and global make up has shown that it is an extremely powerful tool for freedom, innovation, growth and knowledge. With this in mind, please do continue to enjoy the web, but remember to keep your data safe.
With over 20 years experience in fast-paced and often challenging marketing environments, Dan has established himself as a highly successful digital marketer specialising in social media marketing and brand engagement. He is a creative and ambitious individual having proven his ability to both develop and execute marketing strategies within the UK, Europe and the USA producing tangible results. Learn more
