Protecting yourself
For personal protection against identity theft there are a few tools you can use to help protect you from Identity theft.
Card protection. As previously mentioned card details can easy be attained by people with most cards having NFC chips in them, which is basically a little microchip on your card that receives a little bit of power and it transmits your card details. This is how a contactless terminal works but its very vulnerable to misuse due to the lack of security, you can even create devices that can capture this data super easily that can be later used to clone your card, even a mobile phone can be configured to do this. There are a few methods that are free or cost very little that you can do to protect your card.
- Put your cards away in a NFC blocking container, you can buy wallets/purses that have the ability to block any NFC signal making it impossible to get your data while your card is in your wallet, you can also get little inserts to put your card in that does the same thing without needing to buy a new wallet.
- Never give your card over to some one for payment, a lot of card readers are either in from of the till or are wireless so you put your card to the terminal yourself
- Setup your phone to do contactless payments instead of your card and some banks even allow you to disable contactless payments on your card without disabling it on google or apple pay
- Most contactless limits are set quite high by your bank but most allow you to change this. Make it a smaller figure and use chip and pin for anything higher
You can also shred personal documents containing sensitive information rather than just ripping it up and throwing it away, you can even use markers to block out any personal information.
Think also you really need a paper copy maybe you can have it sent via email instead
When using a laptop or personal device in public also think about security anyone watching over your shoulder, use your laptop, tablet or phone with your back against a wall stop anyone looking over your shoulder, for laptops you can even get privacy screen to make it impossible for anyone to see your screen unless they are right in front of the screen, while protecting your keystrokes been observed where possible.
Some of the main things to keep private
- Full name (Hence my Alias name)
- Date of birth
- Home address
- Phone number
- Email addresses
- Bank or credit card numbers
- Photos or videos of your home, car, or family
- Social media usernames
- Location data (GPS or IP address)
- Medical or legal records
Online protection
As Mentioned prior I use Proton for a lot of my privacy, their Swiss based so not part of the 5 eyes countries so they are not obliged to share any ones information unless it is allowed by Swiss law which has always had strong privacy laws , but with Proton all data is encrypted so the amount of data that is able to be shared is limited.
They have a few major services a lot of which will address a lot of privacy concerns. Remember all these are End to End encrypted making any kind of interception impossible.
Encrypted Email
Having an encrypted like Protonmail or Tutanota means all your emails are protected and can not be read by anyone other than the account owner. Proton also make it so if your account password is reset all emails are encrypted and can’t be read even by the person logging in. Great if your account gets compromised and your password reset. Don’t worry you can create a recovery kit that you can use to restore access to the emails.
Basically no more email snooping by your email provider. Both Proton and Tutanota offer free plans which are limited but they do work
Please feel free to use my referral link for 1 month free Protonmail Plus link
For maximum protection for email I would also recommend using an Alias service like Annonaddy or SimpleLogin.
I’m going to cover SimpleLogin as that is part of Proton’s ecosystem as part of the Protonpass password manager. But any alias service will have the same basic concepts.
A password manager like Protonpass creats unique passwords for each login you use so each password is unique for every website. An alias service is very similar but for emails. So rather than using [email protected] for each and every login you will use an alias instead so for your bank you could have somthing like [email protected] or for Amazon [email protected].
So each and every website you have has its own email address. And the alias system will forward them all to your personal email address keeping it hidden and private. And where alias come in handy is their ability to send email from that address also. Simplelogin have a unique address created for each contact that contacts your via an alias.
So you will reply with a recipient of [email protected] but the person on the other end will see it as come from your alias address.
The primary advantages of this is your personal email is kept secret and maybe only shared with friends and family. You also are covered vs SPAM if you start getting spam from a certain address you just create a new address for the service that was compromised and delete the old one. Spam prevented.
You also have a increase of security and scam prevention, Security is because there is no longer a common email for logging into your accounts as each is different, and for SCAM if you get an email sayings its from your bank but has not been received VIA their alias you know it couldn’t have come from them and to completely disregard it.
Both provide free plans but are some what limited in the number or Alias they provide. Their paid plans allow unlimited alias’s and even support custom domains aka the @mydomain.com bit so you always have access to any email account on that domain.
Simplelogin though does offer greater support it has its own app that installs straight into your browser and there is also access via Protonpass which has clients for Windows, Mac, Linux Android, Iphone as well as browser plugins for all major browsers basically virtually anything.