How to Have Good eHygiene

Your grandmother taught you everything you needed to know about good hygiene, flossing, wear clean underwear and make sure your house was spotless before you went on a trip in case you died and the relatives had to clean out your house. What grandmother did not teach you was how to keep your information safe in an e-world and how to keep you equipment safe from malicious software or attacks. You will have to teach grandmother these things, after you convince her that she CAN use the cell phone you bought her last year that is still locked in her glove compartment with a battery that is guaranteed to be dead.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. Set standards for your own behavior.
   
   Make sure passwords are different and kept in a secure location. Do not use the same password for banking that you use at your favorite social blog.
   
   Share information about yourself very cautiously. Remember that your combined web presence can be knit together based on crumbs of information left at multiple sites. Blog posts, chats, social networking sites can all be searched months and years after the posts. Do you really want your late night college day chats with a hot stranger tied to your professional bio as you are trying to get a job.

2. Keep your online presences separate.
   
   Keep a professional presence on a site such as linkedin tied to your professional email address.
   
   Keep a social networking presence on a site such as facebook or myspace tied to your personal email accounts.
   
   Create a screen name with a hotmail email account of the same ficticious name for any online activity that you would not want grandma, mom, your employer, friends or your spouse to see.

3. Keep your equipment safe and clean.
   
   When using a wireless network at home, secure the network. When using a public wifi hotspot change the setting so that your laptop does not default to find and connect to all free networks. If you have access to a VPN (such as through your employer), use it. Turn off all filesharing software.
   
   Keep your hardware clean of tracking cookies or malware by keeping your antivirus up to date. Complement your antivirus with freeware such as adaware or ccleaner that will quickly remove cookies and other obvious threats.
   
   Pay attention to the performance of your system, if it is slow for no reason, take a moment to run all purchased and free antivirus or malware detection software that you have.

Tips & Warnings

• Go to the Additional Resources section to find the link to an incredibly well written and informative article entitled, How to Prepare for Your Digital Death.

Resources

• How to Prepare for Your Digital Death
• How to Keep Your Information Out of Consumer Databases

[godfather25]

on 11/12/2009 Great article good hygiene.