Do anti-viruses tackle unwanted surveillance?
First thing in our mind usually came that is surveillance really exists?
Do I need to be concerned about online privacy and security?
I would recommend you to go through this article.
After understanding the online surveillance, you must think that “ is there any kind of software that might be useful in tackling or detecting unwanted surveillance? ”
Here we need an expert’s advice of this field. In an interview, Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union(ACLU) has put his views on the same, here I am concluding that with my personal view. (This article is what I have learnt from sources including this interview).
One of the most interesting things we got to know that best practices for security are so different from the best practices followed by laypeople. If you would ask the question “ what do you do to protect yourself from viruses or some kind of surveillance ?”, they would commonly reply “anti-virus”. Whereas none of the experts uses the anti-virus. They think of antivirus software, essentially, as a scam that’s designed to take money from consumers who don’t know any better.
We could ask a general person, what kind of password they usually have?
Let’s ask ourself.
The general reply would be (even mine was) the password should have uppercase, lowercase, numerals and special symbols. But the expert would say, it should have a bunch of words, they can all be lowercase. Have a password that’s three or four words long, and the words should have nothing to do with each other. It shouldn’t be lyrics from a song, but it should be easy to type and easy to remember.
Now, you would definitely say “than why websites say that you have to have X number of numbers and characters and whatever?”
On this our Expert Christopher replied that yes that infuriating. We live in a world now, where we need to have a lot of accounts on many websites. So, if we are using the same password to access multiple websites. It’s going to be too dangerous, as if any one of the accounts get hacked, you are going to loss all your details on each account.
So, is he suggesting us to have different password for different accounts?
That means, if I have 50 accounts than I should remember 50 passwords?
No, there is no way for a human being to remember 50 different unique passwords; our brain don’t work in that way.
Christopher recommends to use the tools like password managers, which will create random, long passwords for every website, you have an account. It automatically enters them into the sites, so no need to remember the stuff.
There are several password managers in the market, like: Keeper, 1Password, LastPass…, and many more…
What if we don’t follow these and got hacked or loose your information?
It’s really hard to recover after a hack. You might all your data, and even private data. From a financial perspective, you can put an urgent fraud alert on our account(and sometimes bank will know if your card is hacked earlier than you get to know). You can get a new Social Security Number, but some personal details might got hacked, you can not establish an entire new life. It can be your personal photos or some medical report that you don’t want to reveal. It may be your office’s document, for which you can be fired.
In conclusion, I could say that we all need better education about security, privacy and technology. Threats that are out there are so real, and impact of that can be worse that one can think, so one should learn more about security and privacy.
