Where Government Employees Compromise Their Online Privacy
Sarah Pfledderer has over a decade of writing and editing experience in magazine journalism and blogging. She specializes in lifestyle topics and occasionally dabbles in tech. By day, she is a content marketing specialist at Siege Media.
No matter your desired job title — airport manager, zookeeper, city manager, or even college intern — there’s a sure chance your government or public sector role will involve accessing the internet in some capacity. Even if that may just be applying to it online or turning to an online platform after work to destress.
After all, it’s 2021. The world is more connected than ever before. With that increased connection also comes increased responsibility to connect our individual and personal online privacy.
There are cyber criminals on the lookout for weak spots in your network and even data brokering sites hungry to crawl your public profiles to piece together a customer profile to target you with advertisements.
Despite these known risks, online users repeatedly don’t prioritize protecting their privacy online. Instead, they favor the conveniences of the internet over modifying their online behaviors. This dichotomy is known as the privacy paradox, meaning how our intentions to protect our online privacy don’t match up with how we actually protect our online privacy.
And considering 95 percent of cybersecurity breaches are caused by human error, you don’t need to be qualified for a cybersecurity career to know how to safeguard your online privacy.
To put you on the right path throughout your job-hunting journey, consider these common places you might be compromising your privacy online and how to correct your habits.
Where we compromise online privacy during our job hunt
We have a lot of online touchpoints in our job-hunting process, from the social media profiles we link to our applications, the online shopping sites we visit to pick that just-right interview outfit, and even the online classes we attend to get our qualifications.
Social media and online privacy
It’s no secret that people can be oversharers on social media, and there are many social media mistakes job hunters can make. When it comes to compromising your online privacy on social media, this often happens in our account profiles where we overshare our personal information, filling out every “about me” field to a degree that it becomes a cheat sheet for cybercriminals to piece together our identity. In addition, white-page sites can pull this public information and create a customer profile.
- TIP: To level up your online privacy when using social media, limit what you share in your “about me” fields and set your profiles to private.
Online shopping and online privacy
Job hunting requires a few resources, some of which you might want to purchase online, whether that’s a new laptop, padfolio, or even a suit for your next interview. What you might not realize is that online shopping sites are another place we compromise our online privacy. This is usually in the instances when we save our personal information for later to have a quick checkout experience, such as our payment methods and home addresses. The reality is that data breaches happen and when they do hackers can access this personal information you’ve entrusted with an online site.
- TIP: Safeguard your online privacy while shopping online by inputting your personal information and payment methods for every translation, don’t create a customer profile.
Online schooling and online privacy
Landing a job, of course, requires qualifications and those often come in the form of schooling, including online schooling. This is especially true in the past year when the COVID-19 pandemic forced students to adapt to virtual learning — and made our home Wi-Fi networks work harder because of it. Yet, many households might not have considered ramping up their Wi-Fi security, despite sharing more sensitive information across their networks, such as grades, transcripts, or medical records. The unfortunate truth is that cybercriminals pry on weak Wi-Fi networks in hopes of prying sensitive information from your devices that can be used for identity theft or even extortion.
- TIP: Strengthen your home Wi-Fi signal by using a VPN that encrypts your online activity.
online users repeatedly don’t prioritize protecting their privacy online, instead, they favor the conveniences of the internet.
SARAH PFLEDDERER
Where we compromise online privacy on the job
Despite companies aggressively hiring cyber talent to safeguard their confidential data and sensitive information, it’s up to every individual employee to protect their privacy online and, as an extension their company’s. Consider the following places you might compromise yours and your company’s online privacy after you land your gig.
Video conferencing
As much of the world’s workforce moved to remote work models in 2020, so did our meetings move to video conferences. And with that came a bevy of unbeknown privacy-compromising risks associated with our webcams, beginning with just exposing our homes and surroundings. Unfortunately, cybercriminals can leverage malicious software like spyware to tap into our lens and commit a true invasion of privacy.
- TIP: To protect your online privacy while on a video call, practice webcam awareness by always using a video background, logging out of your video conferencing service after every meeting, and also using a webcam cover.
Online banking
If you’re lucky, your job hopefully doesn’t feel like work at all. But the truth is we all are employed to be compensated. Nowadays that often happens through direct deposits to online banking institutions where we have accounts that hold our financial history and personal information. Of course, cybercriminals know that this is precisely the place they too can access your financial information and they’ll go to great lengths to break into them.
- TIP: Make your online banking accounts unhackable by opting into two-factor authentication and using strong, unique passwords that you change often.
Where we compromise online privacy after work
We all have our own outlets for relaxation after a hard day’s work, but that doesn’t mean the cybercriminals are off the clock. Also, consider the following cybersecurity best practices when visiting these two common places post-work.
Streaming services
The number of streaming services available today can be dizzying, with an account login tied to each of them. Believe it or not, cybercriminals don’t mind prying on these either, in hopes of gathering your payment methods and personal information tied to customer profiles — both of which can be leveraged in attempts of identity theft. What’s more, account logins can also be sold on the dark web.
- TIP: Protect your streaming accounts by opting into two-factor authentication and using strong, unique passwords that you change often.
Online gaming
Long gone are the days when we turned off our work brains with a game of solitaire using a physical deck of cards — and gone too are the days when we played just solitaire on our desktop computers. Nowadays, adults and kids alike turn to online games for human connection, some of which require account logins and also webcam access. Much like other streaming services, cybercriminals too will pray on online gaming account to sell credentials on the dark web and can hack into webcams to commit a true invasion of privacy.
- TIP: Protect your online gaming accounts by opting into two-factor authentication and using strong, unique passwords that you change often. Also, consider using a VPN to encrypt your online activity.
All this to say, no matter what phase of a job hunt you’re in, the importance of protecting your data is all the same. For more online privacy statistics to consider and privacy-compromising habits to break, pore over the infographic below, courtesy of Norton.
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