5 Tips for Internet Safety

Ian: Hey guys, it’s Ian with Kentucky SPIN. And today I want to do a quick video about what are my five tips for internet safety. So let’s dive right in. The first one would be to don’t give out personal info, especially on social media, but also we’ll get into another tip that has to do with that. But you just want to be careful about when and why you’re sharing personal info. And I would just try to limit that as much as possible. That could be like your location, first, middle, and last name. Your social security number, anything, especially any banking information, all that stuff you want to keep secure. And you would only share that in very unique circumstances. And we’ll get to that in a second. So definitely protect your personal information. My second tip would be, be careful where you download stuff. If you download music or movies or if you just get programs. Wherever you get downloads and stuff like that, just be careful because some of that stuff that you download can have malware, that’s what it’s called. And basically that is like a virus that’s on your computer. And that can cause a lot of issues. So I would make sure that just download things that you want from verified sources. Where you can be sure that there’s no type of virus that’s going to infect your computer. And also while you’re surfing the internet, just to be safe, if you’re using a PC, but even with a Mac as well, you some type of a software on your computer that prevents viruses, malware, worms, and stuff like that to get on your computer. My third tip is to keep passwords strong. We need passwords for social media, multiple websites that we make accounts for. Pretty much almost every single website that we have, we have to create an account for it. So. I would definitely create one that’s strong. Usually use, you know, numbers and letters, capitalize some things. Mix it up, throw some dates in there, or throw some something in there to where you’ll remember it but it’s also kind of complicated. So your average hacker or somebody who would be trying to get that information, they can’t get ahold of it. My fourth tip kind of goes back to the first one, which is keep your privacy settings on. So when you’re browsing, depending on what site you’re using each site has its own privacy settings, like Facebook has its own privacy settings. But also the browser itself that you use has different settings that you can go in and change. So I definitely recommend going and changing it to where it’s more private. And also with that, I would definitely encourage you to do that if you’re using public wifi. So if you’re at a coffee, shop the mall or something like that, you definitely want to protect yourself because there could be people that are trying to access your information and use that to purchase things that you didn’t buy. So just to be careful, I would definitely, enhance your privacy settings. Last note about that. You can also do that with your cell phone and a laptop or a tablet, so it doesn’t have to be just a laptop. You could change these settings on any device. My fifth and final tip is if you’re making a purchase, make sure that that purchase is secure. The way that you can do this if a website at the top of the URL, if it says HTTPS the S stands for secure. So you’ll know that it’s safe to put in your information there. Also just to take another step of security, if you want to trust PayPal or, you know, Venmo or whatever type of currency, digital currency that you trust, that’s just another layer of protection. So for me, I typically use PayPal when I can, because over the years, PayPal has seemed to be pretty secure with how they manage the money. So that’s just an option that you can have as well. And that way you don’t have to enter in your bank card information or any account information. It’s literally just your PayPal account, which is going to be an email address and whatever password you create, which again, goes back to wanting to use a secure password. All right, guys, those are my five tips for internet safety. I hope that helped you out and until next time, peace out.