Have you been victim to a data breach, yet? What precautions have you or the organizations whose digital services and products you use, put in place to ensure your personal data stays out of reach of unwanted solicitors or criminals?
Data breaches have become a regularly occurring phenomenon that gets its share of attention every time a big business or corporate entity gets hit and valuable user related information is compromised. Data privacy and data breaches in the recent couple of weeks has once again become the talk of town due to social media major Facebook becoming victim to a breach that compromised valuable personal information of 50 million users.
So, why are these data breaches increasing by the day? What purpose does it serve?
With the digital economy growing from strength to strength and our growing dependence on digital transactions and communications increasing by the day, it has become imperative that having access to digital profiles makes it easy for a business to reach out to target audiences. In the same vein it becomes easy for cyber criminals looking to swindle money from our accounts to utilize our personal digital information to make merry. There are many other serious offences such as identity theft that can be easily carried out with compromised personal information or data.
The timeline below represents some of the renowned entities that have fallen prey to data breaches in the last 5 years.
2018 Facebook gets embroiled in a data leak compromising personal information of 50 million users.
2017 Equifax a consumer credit reporting agency in America gets hit by a data breach, impacting 173 million Americans credit card details and other vital information. Couple other renowned names to be hit by data breaches in the same year included HBO, Instagram.
2016 A healthcare provider named 21st Century Oncology had 2200000 records compromised when they were faced with a data breach.
2015 A data breach that severely infringed on the personal lives of users was the Ashley Madison data breach which saw 37 million user records such as credit card information, addresses and phone numbers getting compromised.
2014 Two well renowned entities one from entertainment and the other from the finance industry, Sony Pictures and JP Morgan respectively had to rethink their data security plans after succumbing to data breaches.
While businesses promise to keep user data private and secure, the growing threat of fishing, unethical hackers and cyber criminals still puts confidential data at risk of getting abused. In terms of application use organizations should refrain from capturing personal data, instead for security reasons and safeguarding user data, every code and application can be run on the device as is the case with Xploree AI Keyboard App. User’s data is always secure, meaning whatever the user types in on the keyboard is never captured or stored. Only intent/context are anonymously matched to the relevant suggestions.
To safeguard one’s own individual interest’s users should follow certain protocols to safeguard their personal digital foot prints.
Here are a few tips to keep you safe from data breaches
- Be responsible for your own data.
- Never ever share passwords or user ID’s.
- Do not store passwords and other confidential information on your phones.
- Ensure you invest time in reading the privacy policies of service providers as well as digital products that require you to sign in or share information.
- Do not share passwords or other confidential information through messages.
- Download and install only verified applications
