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It seems like every time we go online, we see another news article about data breaches that affect millions of consumers. Almost every major corporation (from Walmart to Target to Staples) has experienced a breach; and in the past, we’ve focused on our commercial destruction services that our corporate clients can use to protect themselves (and their clients) from these violations. But as more reports involving the theft of individual’s electronic data are released, we think it’s high time to outline a few helpful tips to ensure your safety while online.

It’s natural for you to spend a large portion of your life online. Modern life has totally changed to accommodate the internet, making it much easier in some ways. You no long have to go to the bank or use Canada Post to pay off your bills; you can search the web for your favourite style of Cheap Monday jeans and pay for them too; you can even use take-out apps like Just Eat to get a pizza delivered to your door. But all of these things require very specific information from you that, should it be found by the wrong people, can make your life much harder that it needs to be. In order to make sure your private information stays private, you have to take the necessary online precautions.

Your choice in web browser is instrumental to securing your time spent online. Browsers like Chrome and Mozilla Firefox both have privacy settings that disables browsing history and the web cache that normally stores the data (like saved passwords) that you use. This feature makes it impossible for companies (and more importantly advertisers) from tracking and logging your information. These two browsers also have reliable apps that can further protect your surfing. Anti-phishing, anti-spyware, and Adblock are apps that can identify suspicious content on websites, emails, and ads that could potentially trace and record your personal information.

Creating diverse and strong passwords is another way to protect yourself. This probably isn’t the first time you’ve been told to strengthen you passwords, but it’s for good reason. People continue to use common, easy-to-guess phrases or dates that make a cyber-thief’s job too easy. When creating an account, you’re going to want to create a random password consisting of letters, numbers, and special characters that you won’t use anywhere else. If you have trouble remembering your SIN (a number you’ve had for years), remembering the unique password for each of your online accounts can be tricky; but password managers like LastPass can be a miracle. Not only does it generate random passwords for all of your accounts, it saves them on an easy-to-use platform. You only need to remember the one password for your LastPass account in order to access all of the others.

While the above two methods will protect your data that you use online, you also need to consider all of the data you store on your computer. People think nothing of downloading tax receipts, passwords, sensitive financial documents, and purchase histories onto their laptops. When you’re done with these things, you can just delete them, right? Not quite. Deleting specific files (or even completely wiping your hard drive) is an inadequate way of clearing this information from your laptop, memory stick, or external hard-drive. If you ever dispose of your old hardware, computer engineers can easily restore the data you thought was gone. The only way to permanently remove sensitive information from your computer (and other digital storage devices like external hard drives and memory sticks) is complete and utter destruction.

When your memory stick is completely destroyed, there’s not enough hardware for a computer specialist to pick through in order to restore your files. So once you’ve settled on a better password and use the right browser, you know who to call to make sure your hardware is protected too. Our mobile shredding trucks are outfitted with the best destructive equipment in the business, and we’re able to pulverize all of your digital data until it’s unsalvageable. By incorporating these tips and our electronic data destruction services into your regular routine, you’ll be protected whenever you log in.