Privacy Matters: How to Protect Your Privacy Online

Protecting your privacy online requires both good technology and good judgment. The following tips can help you enjoy your online experience without compromising your personal privacy:

Keep personal information private

When shopping or conducting other business online, share only the personal and financial information that is required to complete the transaction. Be cautious about sharing too much personally identifiable information—such as your home address, birth date, or employer—in e-mail, instant messages, or chat rooms, and be equally circumspect on social networking sites or when writing in your blog. Once information is on the Internet, it may be accessible by people who could use it to embarrass you or do you harm.

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Never reply to spam

Spam e-mail and instant messages may contain the seeds of online fraud, phishing scams, and identity theft, and the links and attachments in spam may disguise viruses, worms or spyware. Delete spam e-mail without opening it or clicking on the links and attachments it contains. Never reply to spam in any way, especially messages that ask for your personal information or seem to offer a big reward for little or no effort.

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Create strong passwords and don't share them

Create passwords with several characters—longer passwords are more secure—and use a combination of letters, numbers and symbols that will be easy for you to remember but difficult for someone else to guess. Never share your passwords with other people.

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Use multiple e-mail accounts

Increase your privacy by setting up separate e-mail accounts for online shopping, social networking, and communicating with your family and friends. That way, you can protect your primary e-mail address, and if you start getting a lot of spam at one of your secondary e-mail addresses you can shut it down without compromising the others.

Read Web site privacy policies

For ultimate privacy protection, it's best to use only Web sites you already know and trust. When using a new Web site for the first time, read the privacy policy to find out what kind of personal information site administrators require and how they plan to use the information you provide. If you don't like what you see, or if the site has no privacy policy clearly posted, move on.

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Use encryption

You can safeguard your wireless transmissions and restrict access to the files on your computer with encryption, which makes it harder for hackers or other computer users to make sense of your files and signals.

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Use only secure wireless networks

Having a wireless network in your home or using the free wireless hotspot at your local coffee shop increases your mobility, but it can also increase the risk that someone may sneak onto your computer and access your files and personal information without your permission. When you're using a wireless network in a public place, make sure the network is secure before logging on; secure wireless networks will always require you to enter a special key or password to log on. At home, require authentication from any computer that logs onto your wireless network and change the default authentication password regularly.

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Install security software and keep it up to date

Installing security software and keeping it up to date can help protect your privacy by blocking spam e-mail, alerting you to possible phishing scams, detecting and eliminating spyware and malicious software, and making your computer invisible to online criminals.

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