Data protection: How to prevent data theft in everyday life

Data protection in everyday life is becoming an increasingly important topic, with news about data theft circulating through the media every day. In this practical tip, we will show you how you can protect your data in everyday life, even if you are not an IT expert.

Everyday data protection: Safe surfing

The major online services store a large amount of information about their users. In the following points we show you the best ways to protect yourself against data theft in everyday life.

• Tracking: Hardly do you search for certain products on the Internet and you get advertisements on every page. There are many tracking technologies, with the "DoNotTrackMe" tool you can block a large number of them.
• Search engine: If you are not dependent on a specific internet browser, you can also stop tracking with an alternative search engine such as "Startpage". Although this shows Google results, it switches between them so that the major search engines cannot collect data about you.
• Email: If you want to log in to a website without providing your email address, you can use a disposable email address. This can only be reached for a few minutes and prevents countless newsletters from collecting in your mailbox.

Data protection: Encrypt data correctly

Millions of data are sent through the Internet every day, and hardly anyone worries about the correct encryption of sensitive files. Below we show you how to protect your data from third parties.

• Attachments: Contracts or application data in particular should be sufficiently encrypted before you send them as an email attachment. With the "TruPax" tool, you can easily encrypt attachments in the form of directories, making them inaccessible to third parties.
• Cloud: If you use free cloud services, you can also secure yourself with external software. "Boxcryptor" creates a virtual drive in your PC, here you can encrypt sensitive files before uploading.
• Data carriers: If you back up important files on an external data carrier, you take a great risk. If you lose the USB stick or the external hard drive, everyone can view and publish this data. Here, the "VeraCrypt" tool offers the possibility of protecting your data from third parties in the event of loss.
• Passwords: The more passwords you use, the more secure you are on the Internet. At some point, however, it will be difficult to remember all of these passwords. If you use a password manager, you only need a master password and have access to all your passwords at any time.

In our next practical tip you will learn how you can completely delete all data on a drive.