Month: April 2025

And by extension…

BobbieLeave a comment

I’m tired. It’s mostly a good tired, like the tired you get after a long but positive (either in productivity or just vibes) day. It has the same quality as the soreness you get from working out really hard, not the soreness you get from twisting an ankle or (as time marches on) that appears to show up from nowhere. (My brother and I once had a conversation on “aging” as he is junior and so I try to keep him abreast of what is up next. I told him that after 45, it’s not so much “what’s going to hurt today”, as “what all is going to hurt today, and for how long”.)

I spent my middle and high school years daydreaming, and didn’t quite get my act together until the last year, really. The interesting thing there is that last year was absolutely STACKED with stuff– unlike previous years, I participated in after school activities (to the extent that I could). I took at least one honors class. I had a fully stacked babysitting calendar plus at least one job. I learned to scuba dive. I had a bunch of things piled on in a very short period with very real deadlines and it weirdly felt like the more I piled on the more I could do; if there wasn’t a lot to do then I just kinda fell back and daydreamed and read a lot. (Note to self: if you have or are a person who likes to retreat in fiction books to the possible detriment of their schoolwork, having 2000 books *in the house* by authors like Michener, Asimov, Niven, Heinlein, Herriot, etc. are going to get you more of that behavior). I don’t regret it (much).

This extended into college, coupled with the realization that the major I picked and the reality of the world were two different things. Keep in mind this was before the internet, and before you could access information with a few clicks: the understanding of what a science degree was, what it would actually get you, and what the process actually was to get somewhere, didn’t arrive until I got into UW and realized: no one was going to hand me a bunch of money and a boat to go study sharks. Or at least, not any time soon. That path was going to entail a Master’s Degree, and probably a Doctorate, and I was already not having a good time at school. I was working three jobs (all part time, I wasn’t crazy) but I wasn’t really attending to my schoolwork. I graduated and took the first employment that had a reasonable wage so I could eat and pay rent.

Fast forward some years (okay about 10 years) and I found myself a single parent with a “career”. It just sort of happened – I mean, yes, I went back to school for some stuff and yes I cajoled and pleaded and got job transfers and tried really hard – but I didn’t do anything like the LinkedIn signaling/go do networking type stuff one does today. This was nearly 20 years ago. I just kept reaching out for things that looked interesting enough, and that would pay me.

In that time I’ve continued the pattern of piling on things when it didn’t look like there was “enough”. Before I was a mom there was always a side hustle (in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, you could make some cash if you knew VBA and could get PowerPoint to do things it does easily now, like embed videos; you could also build websites. Most folks of my generation remembers a time when “everybody was a web designer”). After I became a mom there was always something too: PTA, library trips, sports, Boy Scouts, etc. As the offspring grew and became more independent, and I started having more “free” time, I would toss in other things: helping out a local nonprofit, running food drives, taking on extra work from actual work, etc. I felt better when there was lots to do, and a variety of it.

One time I was changing companies and took a week off between the two. This gave me something unusual in and of that I literally had *no job* for that week and so in preparation for that week I made a longish list in One Note of all the things I was going to do that week. But because it was in a list, and I saw the list, the bulk of that list was done before the week ever came. (Don’t fret tho: I replenished the list). That was when I first clued into the fact that *something* was driving me to Do Things and that I couldn’t “just sit still”. I mean, I had had friends point this out before – a meeting in Montreal where I was constantly making lists and bouncing my knee and my friend looked at me and said, “you can’t sit still, can you?” (she said it *really nicely*; it was more of an observation than an accusation) – but it’s different when you realize that it’s *true*.

I have this fantasy of having a “do nothing weekend” – where I do nothing. No housework, no obligations, certainly no work. Every time I block the calendar for this, and I tell the Husband person, and we vow this will happen for real this time; and every time something comes up. Usually because I thought “well it’s just one thing”. I signed up for a knitting class (I finally have the finger dexterity to knit in the round! It only took fifteen years), I go out and deadhead the garden, well and I can’t *not* lift, etc. I get to Sunday and look back at a “do nothing weekend” in which I have indeed done something — usually many somethings — and I am tired. Yet here I sit, looking at my calendar for the week, the month, and the year — thinking “oh I can squeeze in more. I wonder if XYZ needs help? Or maybe I should plan out ABC?”

There is a part of my brain that is constantly looking for things to do and wanting the reassurance of relevance and purpose. It chooses to jam stuff into the “schedule” in a Tetris-like fashion, because it knows that if it does not and if I do not have enough to do, Things Will Not Go Well. I don’t know why it thinks that since it has been thirty years since I’ve neglected my schooling, and I don’t think I’ve dropped too many balls since then; it just thinks “more is better” and piles it in. I think there’s also a quality of “if I fill every day with lots to do of a positive and/or productive nature, I don’t have to think about the really awful things in the world” and I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. Thus far the only negative impact of this approach has been the occasional overextension, and the occasional crash that comes after fixing that. It doesn’t happen often enough to make me stop, apparently. I’m not typically over-extended, just… extended.

Privacy

BobbieLeave a comment

Firstly, and this is super depressing to write, understand that you will never be 100% private, and that privacy is also a never ending game. Everything we do online has an electronic trail that leads back to us and relies on the infrastructure of the entities we interact with to keep us private. In most cases – and especially when we are using “free” services – *we* are the product.

DeleteMe

Deleteme is a service you pay for that identifies how much of your personal information is out there for use/abuse, and helps you remove it: search engine results, data brokers (these are the companies that purchase from like Facebook and Amazon all kinds of data about you, and then they marry it up with other data they’ve gathered), and things like public records (e.g., why you can search someone’s name and see them on White Pages, Spokeo, etc.).  Remember the old days when White Pages was a physical book and you picked up your rotary phone to call them to tell them to remove you from the book (okay maybe you don’t but I do)? Those days are gone, and now every site has a different process. Using a service like Deleteme can help streamline that.

That said, there are places where you may want to share information, but only to people you know and like. This could be on Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever. Deleteme won’t delete from what you’ve specified there, and so there are some things you will want to do to make sure that your information only is visible to the people you want to see it.

Social Media

Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads)

On Facebook, go to the top right screen, click your avatar, go to Privacy Settings, and there’s a whole menu of things you can do. Here are some recommendations:

  • Identify who can see your profile information (things like your email, birthday, city, who can see your friends, who can see your people and pages, who can see your posts/stories, limiting your past posts, etc.
  • Most of these rely on a curated friend group and someone knowing you’re on Facebook and sending you an invite that you must accept (or direct) before they can see your stuff.
  • The levels are typically: Only Me, Friends, Public, or a curated group

You should then update your Ad topics in account center: this is who gets to advertise to you and what they get for it. Go to “Ad Preferences”, “Manage Info”, which will tell you how your data is used for advertising.

Finally – there is a section where you can view and manage your activities on Meta products. Note that it will have your activities across all Meta products (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) and will give you an idea of what all they track. And if you continue reading, there’s the FBP browser extension that can curb even more.

Instagram and Threads have similar experiences – go to your profile and there is a section that links to your privacy. Remember that unique identifiers are best for people who are trying to invade your privacy: usernames, emails, etc. Keep your email(s) private, and usernames unique, if you want to make it harder (never impossible) for someone to find you.

X/Twitter

X (fka Twitter) has a Privacy & Security section in which you can control your visibility, your post visibility, people’s access to your DM’s, etc.

LinkedIn

Much as with Facebook, on LinkedIn you can lock down to just your network of chosen people, make it so you don’t show up in search results (or only show up for a certain level of “connectedness”, e.g., if you and I know the same person I can see you, but if I know someone who knows someone who knows you, I can’t). You can also specify how LinkedIn uses your data. 

Reddit

One of the very first things that Reddit will tell you in their Privacy Policy is that they are a public platform. Anyone can see your profiles, posts, and comments, meaning that a person with a lot of spare time and access to their API’s could sieve through your post history and look for context clues of who you are (because your username can be blissfully anonymized, like “TigerPanda640” or suchlike. 

Microsoft

Your Microsoft account is likely also tied to your Xbox account or other products, and much as with other providers and platforms you can control some things.

In the Settings & Privacy tab of your Account Overview, and walk through the Privacy “Make sure you’re safe and secure” guide. It will also link you to the different Microsoft product structures (e.g., Xbox, Teams, etc.)

NOTE: much as with Reddit, Xbox handles are public, and so you would want to have a handle that isn’t easily identifiable as you. 

Most Microsoft data visibility is within your organization (so at work, people can see your work email information; at home, only you can see your email information (or your family if you have a family account)). It’s not like there’s a forum in which that information would be scrapable by simple search; for someone to get ahold of this there would have to be an actual security breach of some kind. For that, see “Security” to avoid the impact there.

Apple

Apple is KNOWN for its privacy and security, and much like Microsoft there isn’t a way for someone to get your information *from* Apple unless you shared it out or unless they’ve been breached. Much as with all these other entities, go to your profile, and adjust any privacy/security settings as appropriate.

Google

There are two places to lock down your Google information: one is locking it down from Google (managing your ad settings and activity controls) and the other is locking down your account information (and who can see it, including in product reviews and endorsements. To address that, go to your account, go to Personal Info, and under “choose what others see” select “Go to About Me”. You can see your visibility per information item there and make it private or visible to anyone.

Useful Apps are Useful, but…

Yelp. Open Table, DoorDash. Lyft. Instacart. Any application on your phone that requires you to log in, is getting some kind of data about you and has an account for you. (Even if it doesn’t require a login, that app likely has information about your phone, location, etc. it can get as part of existing on your phone). In your account settings you should be able to update how much is visible to someone (either at the company or as part of an advertiser). 

Other Websites

There will be sites you *want* your image on – a local foundation, board service, etc. – that you cannot lock down (because that would defeat the purpose of visibility). For these, there are a few things you can do, though it would be hard to enforce:

  • Use a unique picture. In the old days someone could take a picture, reverse image search, and find everywhere else that picture is used, to draw a connection to different places a person works/does work. (They can still do this). However, with AI, they could now use that picture to extrapolate similar other pictures so the picture no longer has to be exact to trace you. 
  • See if the information can be behind a log in (e.g., if it’s board information, require membership to log in)
  • Use an avatar instead of a picture (this… can feel unprofessional)
  • Use abbreviations of names (e.g., B. Conti or Bobbie C) – small roadblocks can be useful. 
  • Do not have emails useable on a website. E.g., instead of bobbie.conti@gmail.com, which can be picked up and read by a scraping machine (and useful for creating a spam attack), you can list it as bobbie.conti, on gmail.
  • Website owners can make things a little easier by requiring verification of humanity and actual enrollment for newsletters – e.g., when someone “signs up” for their newsletter, they should send a confirmation request/update to the email address *before* actually signing them into the email service. I love websites that do this because it makes it harder for people to use them in spam attacks.

Nom Nom Nom on your Data: Cookies

Cookies are little trackers that websites drop onto your local machine. If you log in to a website on your PC, and then on your phone, it’s dropped cookies in both places as relates to your log in (if you had one) or any number of other log ins (if they’re affiliated with say, Facebook). This means that when you go back to the site six days later, it can go to your cookies file and read all of the cookies in that file: and it will know things like what other sites you’ve been to, what you looked at, etc.

“Cookies” and your “cookie hygiene” are what comes into play when you go to a website and it gives you that “Accept All”, “Reject All”, and then typically a setting where you can “pick”.  The options are typically:

  • Functional – these you typically cannot opt out of, and they will help convey information to the site owner about issues with their site, performance, etc.
  • Experiential – these are things they track like your preferred products, pages, etc. 
  • Advertising/Marketing  – these are things like tracking what specific things you looked at and marrying it up with other data to either infer what you would like (target advertising to you) or to have other sites use (so they can target advertising to you). 

You can, for example, reject all cookies out of hand. You can also go through and clean out “cookie deposits” on your machines. Because cookies are dropped and used by a browser, the instructions on how to remove them are browser specific:

  • Edge
    • Go to Settings, Privacy, Clear Browsing Data, click Control and Shift and Delete at the same time. 
  • Safari
    • Go to Settings & Preferences, go to your Privacy tab, click Manage Website Data or Clear History and Website Data, select Remove All (or pick which sites), and click Remove Now or Delete to Confirm.
    • You can also select to block all cookies, and prevent cross-site tracking.
  • Chrome
    • On Chrome, at top right, click More (with the vertical 3 dots), and select Delete Browsing Data. Choose a time range (last hour, all time etc.) and specify which information you want to remove. 
    • Click Delete Data.
  • Duck Duck Go
    • Duck Duck Go doesn’t store cookies and cache.
  • FireFox
    • Click on the menu button (the three horizontal lines), select Preferences or Options, go to the Privacy and Security panel, in the Cookies and Site Data section, click “Clear Data”. You can elect to clear cookies, site data, or both.

Shields Up or Shields Breached: Browser Extensions

Browser extensions can help or hurt, depending on which browsers and which extensions. A Browser extension is software that will extend the functionality of your browser: it is supposed to add helpful things. These are things like password managers, social media tools, and ad blockers.

Helpful Extensions

  •  Fluff Busting Purity – this will remove Facebook’s ability to track you and spam you with ads. It hides sponsored posts, suggested posts, newsfeed posts from unknown authors, allows you to give it specific phrases for topics to avoid, etc.
  • Ghostery is a web privacy extension that blocks trackers, ads, and can opt you out of automatic cookie dumping (aka “never consent”)
  • Bitwarden has a browser extension for ease of access to your vault.

Generally speaking, most beneficial/altruistic extensions operate on donations (e.g., FB Purity and Ghostery do), and so it’s nice to slide a few dollars their way (if you can).

Private Messaging

There are a variety of messenger services out there, including iMessage (which comes with an iphone), regular SMS texting, WhatsApp, and Signal. WhatsApp and Signal offer double-ended encryption, meaning that, in theory, there is encryption on your device and encryption on the recipient’s device, and the intermediary (the messenging service) cannot access or decrypt your messages (they’d have to have access to both phones). That said, there is evidence that WhatsApp has a “back door” – the recipient of any message can flag it, and once that message is flagged it is copied and sent to Facebook/Meta for review. This means that there is nothing stopping WhatsApp from “self flagging” a message for perusal).

Instead, I advocate Signal. Signal is end to end encrypted, there is no evidence of a back door, and Signal has stated *in court* that it has no way of decrypting messages (nor will it build a back door to support that). Signal is also supported via donation.

App Hygiene

When you download an app to your phone, especially an iPhone, it runs you through a bunch of questions and may include Terms and Conditions. The biggest things it will ask you, though is:

  • Is it allowed access to your camera and microphone?
  • Is it allowed access to your photo library?
  • Is it allowed access to your contacts?
  • Is it allowed access to your location?

iPhones

Each of the privacy settings above are available in the individual app menu: go to Settings, scroll down to Apps, select which app you’re interested in.

You can: 

  • Set location usage to “always”, “while using”, and “never” (and if an app is using your location it will have the little location arrow showing purple or outlined). Some also have “Ask next time or when I share”.
  • Set access to photos (None, limited access (where you select which ones), Full access)
  • Microphone and Camera are typically toggles.
  • Contacts offer None, Limited (select users), Full access.

Android

To review the privacy settings on an Android Phone, go to Settings, App, the specific app, and then Permissions. Mostly you can toggle between allow and don’t allow. 

Sniff Sniff

Let’s say you’ve done the above – you’ve locked down your socials, you’ve used deleteme – the barn doors are closed! Except there’s a window, and that window is you out in the world with your computer – let’s close that window.

  • “Free Wifi” isn’t free, and it could be problematic. When you use your machine to connect to free wifi, you are giving up some measure of information about your machine and also what you are doing – they can get your IP address/MAC address (basically, they have an identifier for that machine/you), they can see what sites you go to (yes even in incognito mode), etc. They don’t see your passwords, but they would be able to infer from the collection of data over time (and marrying it up with that broker data) who you are and what you do and where you go. 
  • Use a VPN on your machines if you’re in public – yes, this is a pain and yes, you have to pay for it. A good one is Nord VPN. This establishes a secure network and so while you would be able to join the “free” wifi, the sharing of your IP address, visibility into what sites you go to, etc. is gone. 
  • Do not plug into public USB ports to charge your phones or any device. Instead, get a USB Condom (yes it’s called that). A USB condom looks like a little USB “bridge” that has one end you stick YOUR USB into, and the other end you stick into the “free” power port.  USB condoms work by shorting the data pins and only allowing the power pins to work on a USB connection.

Doxing

Doxing is rooted in the phrase “dox” which in turn is a bastardization of “docs” which is essentially the idea that someone has all your docs/documentation. In practical terms, if someone says they have been “doxed” or “doxxed”, or will “dox” you, what they are doing/have done is assembled enough information about you that they can blab to the world that User123 is in fact Princess Buttercup who lives at 642 Florin Way, Fire Swamp, Guilder, Fantasyland, and her phone number is 555-867-5309 and her IP is (insert rando ip address here). Someone “doxing” you means they know where you are and who you are and can publish that information, and it is an actual threat to your safety.

Here’s the thing to understand about doxing:

  1. Some people can actually do it, 
  2. Most people threaten to do it but don’t actually do it,
  3. Once you have been doxed it is very hard to get private again.

If you have set your stuff to private, used pseudonyms where you can, avoided posting anything publicly, used deleteme, etc. etc., it should be very hard to dox you. Doxing takes a lot of effort for a hobbyist and practically none for a hacker, but most hackers do not want to dox you they just want your money – so lock down your passwords and use at least 2 factor authentication on your bank accounts and rotate your credentials regularly.

Avoiding Doxxing

The person who wants to dox you on a public forum is a sad pathetic cretin who has nothing better to do in their life than make other people miserable because then maybe they can feel something. Doxers get off on the power trip of “I know who you are” and so there are two ways to combat this:

  • Yea, and??
    • This method (the it’s okay if you know who I am) is only good if you are reasonably sure of your physical security and circumstances – if you are living off the grid in remote Montana and surrounded by security cameras and a moat with sharks with laser beams attached to their heads, well, then that works just fine.
      • Alternatively, if you’re reasonably sure that someone would not have a real-world grudge against you then the likelihood that anyone would do anything with that data is small. But. That relies on rational actors, and we have precious few of those these days.
      • This is not “Come at me, Bro”. This is “all of the information you have/had is publicly available anyway and I am reasonably sure of my physical security”.
  • Locking down your stuff to make it hard.
    • See all of the stuff above. Use pseudonyms, don’t share your email address (or have a “spamhole” email address – I use my gmail for this – and then a separate one that is your “real people use this” and maybe a third for “this is my banking stuff email”), post privately, curate your audience.
    • Do Not Engage with Trolls.
      • Don’t get into online pissing contests in forums with people who are clearly escalating and/or not hearing it.
      • Leave the Chat

If you have been Doxed or are Threatened with Doxing

First, Don’t panic. Panic will not serve you now… force that panic down, get a cold glass of water, and if it helps to think about you leaping into action to help a friend, then do that. 

  • Document – screenshot the discourse, save emails, identify what was said, who said it, their username/handle, any identifying information you have about them, what they did or did not say they had done or would do, and how much information they have disclosed already.
  • Go back and clean your stuff – if you missed something or if there is any indication of where they got that information from, go back and see if you can further lock it down.
    • If you can, it will prevent others from using it.
    • If you can’t, it’s something to inform the site owners in terms of a privacy/ security hole.
  • Report the incident to whichever platform the doxing occurred on (e.g., if on Reddit someone says they’re going to dox you, report it to Reddit) and occurred from (e.g., if that Redditor says they found your info on Facebook, also report it to Facebook). Keep copies of your reports, date and time sent, and any replies you get.
  • Call in the law. Depending on the nature of the doxing you may want to involve your local police, sheriff, and or the FBI.  This has twofold purpose: one, is you may need their help for this (especially if this includes any sort of physical threat), but secondly, a popular pastime of some doxers is to “swat” your house (this is where they anonymously call in an incident at your house and the SWAT team shows up earnestly; if you’ve been doxed and you let them know you’ve been doxed they will be prepared to address it.
  • Get legal help. Doxing is also a form of harassment, and because it can lead to physical consequences (Even if the person *doing the doxing* wasn’t the one threatening physical harm – usually there’s one troll to share the information and one or more trolls to do something with that information), you want legal help in pursuing the doxer (if you can).

Other Things to Think About

How People Can Find You

  • Do you have a personalized plate? Does your car have lots of identifying stickers (e.g., “proud parent of a child at XYZ School”)
  • Do you have a blog?
  • Do you have a business *in your name*? Registered to your home address?
  • Are you prominently featured on one or more public websites?
  • Do you own property in your name (most public assessor’s sites are linked from Zillow, for example, and so addresses can be “backed in” to people’s names).
  • Google yourself. You’d be surprised. I’m on a registry for my son’s high school PTA from four years ago.
  • If you share photos, understand that every photo is by default encoded with metadata about where and when it was taken. That metadata can travel with the photo: in your iPhone, select any photo, and then slowly scroll up while touching the photo: you will see the date, time, what camera took it, what size the photo was, and so forth. If you share a photo, you’re going to share that metadata too. You can strip it from the photo before sharing it, and you can set your photo app on your phone to not include information like location data.

Perspective

You may find yourself – as I do, writing this – trying to do the risk assessment on privacy. After all, I have a personalized plate, I have property in my name, all of my social media handles (with the exception of Reddit and Xbox) are essentially my name and I have 15 years of blogging under my name with a personalized domain. Detaching myself from all of that would be a huge pain if not impossible. There are still things I do though: I secure my stuff, have a spamhole email, use Bitwarden, use USB condoms, etc. If a hacker is going to read through 15 years of posting history to glean information about me what they will find is that I am too hung up on work, I’m neurotic, I have an internet addiction that is useful, and occasionally I “enjoy” testing my physical capabilities. 

Risk has three elements:

  • What could go wrong?
  • How bad would it be if it did?
  • How likely is it to happen?

(Benefit also has the same calculation and so to illustrate that I will use a positive example):

  • What could go right? I could win the lottery.
  • How good would it be if I did? Pretty darned good!
  • How likely is it to happen? Extremely unlikely as I don’t often buy tickets.

Therefore, preparing for a lottery win, while it sounds like a fun distraction, is probably not useful.

Now the less fun side:

  • What could go wrong? I could get doxed on Reddit.
  • How bad would it be if it did? Not sure. Most of what I’ve posted are comments about sewing techniques or gardening. But they could find my reddit handle and attribute it to me, and maybe have my name and address and personal email to share. That said:
    • My address is already available by a property records search and/or white pages.I have four emails (active, two dormant) and depending on which one they share I make that one the spam hole one (if it isn’t already) and have to spend a tedious afternoon rewiring things.
    • If they show up at my house (or threaten to show up at my house) things would be problematic and for that I would engage law enforcement and probably an attorney.
  • How likely is it to happen? Also not sure. Most of what I post is banal, but I am associated with things that would make a certain factor in our society upset (love that for them), and so… I don’t know. I’m a mere Board Member, but one cannot plumb the depths of stupid mixed with malice. So to address a *potential* likelihood, I do some of the prudent things.

There is no foolproof way to avoid privacy/security/doxing issues, but there are steps you can take. 

Security

Bobbie1 Comment

It’s important to understand that the personal security space – that is, how you lock down your stuff – is a constant game of whack a mole. “For each fine cat, a fine rat” – as you close down some things, enterprising bad actors will find new ways in. Your very best option is to approach it as defense in depth by using multiple interventions to make it harder for them. Think of it like Swiss cheese slices: a single slice of Swiss cheese has many holes. Putting one slice of Swiss cheese on another limits the visibility of some holes but not others. Stacking a bunch of pieces of Swiss cheese will further close more holes.

This is a compilation of what I recommend for individuals and their (mostly cyber) security. A second post on Privacy is forthwith.

First, let’s get some terminology straight:

  • Security is the ability to ensure that we have Authentication and Authorization (AuthN and AuthZ). 
    • Authentication = we can verify you are really you. Examples are when you use a password and then get a code to your phone you have to enter, or have a PIN code to use, or a passphrase.
    • Authorization = once we know you are you, are you even allowed to be here and what are you allowed to do? For example, you can authenticate into your bank website as you, but you are not authorized to see anyone else’s stuff.
  • Privacy is the ability to ensure that ONLY authorized people get to see personal information (also known as PII, or Personal Identifying Information), and the person doing that authorization is the owner of the data (namely, you). 

Security Basics

The reality is there are a variety of different ways to secure things, and they are not employed consistently – so for example some sites have you authenticate in using your email, others require you to create a username. Some will send your second factor of authentication ONLY to a phone text, others will do email, still others will require or support an authentication app on your phone (and yet others will allow you to use a physical USB key you carry around with you). There are also “passkeys”, which are where a unique encryption is stored half on your machine and half on the server for the site you’re using, so unless someone has you, your machine, and that website, they can’t get in as you.

That said, there are some standardized ways to keep your stuff secure (or more secure):

  • Do not re-use passwords. I know, it’s tempting. But all it takes is someone getting ahold of one email/password combination, and they can feed that into a program and have it try a million different places to see what else they can get in to. There are password vaults that will create unique strong passwords for your sites, or you can use a pattern (a friend of mine uses album names and song names).
  • Regularly update your passwords. Passwords get leaked and stolen and bought.
  • Use a Password vault. I use Bitwarden.  Much like Apple’s Passwords, it will securely house your passwords, passkeys, etc. and will also tell you if that password is reused anywhere, and if it has been found on the dark web (where passwords are bought and sold). 
  • If you can use an authentication app, do so. It gets rid of the vulnerability that may happen if someone has access to your texts or emails.
  • Especially for banking stuff: you can set your communication preferences to tell you if a transaction more than $x has happened, or if someone has logged into your account.
  • Don’t click links in a text and be equally careful of links in email. If you get a “text” from GoodToGo, or your bank, or whatever, instead go directly to the website you know is theirs, and log in as you. If you don’t recognize the number, or if when you hover over the email “name” it’s an entirely different address (or the formatting is off, or there are misspellings, wonky grammar, or an inflated sense of urgency), do not click.
  • Have a separate email account for your banking/super important stuff, and your “shopping/etc” stuff. Online retailers can and often do sell your data and/or exploit cookie allowance for that purpose, so separate your concerns.
  • Do your security updates regularly: most of the iPhone updates you get (iPad, MAC, Windows, etc.) include a poop-ton of security patches and fixes and the longer you take to do your updates the longer you are leaving your barn doors open.
  • If you get a “here’s your code for logging in” *and you didn’t log in*, go to the website (open a fresh browser page and go there, don’t click on any links in the mail just in case), log in, see if anything has been messed with (especially for a bank account), *change the password immediately*, and notify the site owner via the site or the phone number on the site that you got a 2FA notification you did not ask for. Work with the site’s fraud department to address anything weird.

Secure your Credit and Identity

There are other things you should do to secure your credit and your information:

  • Freeze your credit with all three agencies (prevents anyone from using your data to open new credit lines/cards). Those three are Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion.
  • If you suspect your identity has been compromised and that someone is trying to or has used your social security information fraudulently, go to identitytheft.gov to report it and further lock down your information.

There are also subscription services you can use to monitor your credit and your identity for potential theft: oftentimes when you are notified of a data breach, the legal requirement is, at minimum, the breached party offer you this monitoring for one year for free. 

Securing your Networks and Devices

As we all know by now, all incognito mode spares you is someone identifying which pages you’ve visited when you lend them your browser — it doesn’t shield your internet provider from seeing them, or even your router. You’ll want to lock down who can see what.

  • Use a VPN where you can – VPN stands for Virtual Private Network and it means that from your machine to the machine your machine is talking to (‘cos the internet’s a series of tubes), the “tube” is locked on either end. More to the point, your cellular service, internet service provider, etc. do not get to see what you’re looking at or what you’re doing.
  • Avoid using Free Wifi, or make sure to use a VPN if/when you do. Remember that if something is “free”, you are the product.
  • Use USB condoms wherever you can. Those “free chargers” are not really free and can be infected with junk; USB condoms short the two data pins in a USB connection to allow for “just power”. You’re better off bringing your own charging block tho.
  • Secure your Router – change the default password to a strong one (the Admin password and the access password, each). Enable encryption (WPA2 or WPA3), and make sure you do your security patches for the router firmware.
  • If you have “Smart anything” in your home: put it on a separate network from your computers/phones that you bank/do business on; make sure all the Smart gadgets have *separate passwords* (your Smart TV and your Smart Fridge should have different passwords, for example).

Next Up: Privacy.