Privacy on mobile phones, it is essential to protect it, because they are the ones that store more information of all our activities and tasks in it. The most private conversations are saved, and just thinking that a third take possession of this, it is a total danger.
Due to this and its importance, we have worked and collected truthful information to help you increase the protection of your privacy, so you can keep a totally confidential life.
Here, we will show you the different dangers that we submit when using smart phones, and we will also teach you what to do to avoid them.
What are the top smartphone privacy risks?
When we talk about privacy risks we are not only referring to those that we can face when using a computer or browsing the Internet, in this topic as well mobile devices are included. Nowadays we usually use our devices for endless activities, and like all systems there can be large information leaks.
Among the most relevant incidents that can be found are the following:
- Leaks or extraction of personal information
- Software infection malicious: Botnets, Spam, among others
- Information extraction via Bluetooth
- Identity fraud, also know as spoofing
- Data cloning such as conversations or multimedia files
- Software injection advertising
Although, these they are not the only threats and risks that we face, are the most relevant, and their effectiveness can cause us unimaginable losses.
Why is it important to take care of the privacy of our smartphones?
Our phones they control all our activities, or mostly of them, since new technologies have allowed us manage everything we do including making decisions that many think must be entirely human. But we must understand that a phone alone cannot take care of everything, it needs us to install applications with special software. We can see the reviews of them to see how they work, but in none of them we will find information with privacy.
Normally the issue of privacy in our Smartphones is totally neglected, which should not happen, because since it is the device that controls most of us, also contains more information of our lives. Whenever we install an application on our mobile we must accept terms and conditions and with this we give permissions to many things, including access to the gallery and personal information.
For example, WhatsApp is one of the most common app has become among people with mobile phones, and despite offering us end-to-end encryption, if they are victims of an attack, the hacker you will have more information about us, knowing us better than our own relatives. The seriousness of the issue should be alarming to all of us, because risking all our privacy is like living a life without filters. That is why we must carry out tasks that allow us improve our privacy..
Learn step by step how to configure your smartphone to improve privacy
To live in a way private, we must meet some methods to ensure that this is the case.
With the following tricks you can keep all your information private, forever:
Know the permissions of the applications
As we already mentioned in the previous section, whenever we are going to install an application on our mobile, we will have to accept the permissions for it to work properly. The detail is, when we do not know what permissions we are accepting because we are not dedicated to reading the terms and conditions.
On the other hand, we must also make a analysis of the permissions that we are going to accept. For example, if we are installing an app that tells us the state of the weather, and when downloading it asks us for permissions to have access to our gallery, messaging or another that is not related to its operation, immediately we must discard the idea of installing This application.
Don’t install APKs or third-party apps
Eight out of ten smartphone users have installed applications on their mobiles external Google PlayEither because it does not appear in the store, or because the store does not allow it to be installed in the system version. Doing this is so dangerous that only in moments all our information can be seen seriously compromised.
These APKs, do not guarantee confidentiality in any of the areas, and installing them is also taking risks. The great experts in security and privacy do not recommend installing applications on our mobiles until we fully verify that it complies with what it offers us, and that it maintains all the guidelines of data anonymity, in its bases.
Install a good antivirus
Installing a good antivirus is the most recommended if we want protect the privacy of our data. The protection that this software can provide us prevents hackers from penetrating the security of the system and captures all our information.
In the day-to-day of the digital world, we face a big list of dangers, but if we install the right anti-malware we can decrease that percentage of risk. Any movement of information that the software detects as unusual, it will block it and inform us of what is happening. With this mechanism we will avoid remote control of our devices, or the extraction of data over free wireless connections.
Keep the OS updated
An outdated operating system it is a gap for the attacks to be effective against our mobiles, because the accumulation of errors are vulnerabilities that hackers take advantage of to achieve their goals.
The only way to strengthen our security system and prevent attacks from being effective, is keeping our operating system updated. Although fine, this not only goes with the OS, it must also be met with all the software we have installed. Smartphones mostly update their system automatically, however, there are some exceptions that require user approval, and for that reason you we recommend visiting the information from your mobile and check system status.
Set Google Privacy
Set the privacy of Google, is one of the better options to improve privacy from our phone. If we want to do it, we must go to the “Setting“And then to the option of”Privacy”, Where we will find a list of options that we can activate or update.
The functions that Google allows us to update from the privacy settings are the following:
- Preload pages for faster browsing: what these options want to indicate to us is that we can configure so that Google first investigates the address before allowing us access, resulting in a fast loading of the page.
- Do not allow tracking: Everything we do on the Internet or on the phone leaves traces, but by activating this feature, we require Chrome not to allow tracking of our data.
- Clear browsing data: Most of our activities are stored in history, but if we delete the browsing data, there will be no record of what we do.
Correctly configure your browser
Browsers normally share information in their databaseAlthough most of them are useful for browsing to be totally successful, it is advisable to deactivate a few of them if we want private browsing. Google Chrome is one of the browsers most common in smartphones, and it provides us with a large number of functions that allow us to navigate quickly and privately.
Between the different functions incognito browsing is found. Like the unknown windows, we can also configure the synchronization of our data with our Google account. This activity is useful to keep all our activities registered in our accounts, but disabling this option we will avoid a capture of our data during its storage on the servers.
For change these options we must go to the browser settings and select the synchronization option. We can choose the data that we want to be shared and which not. We select those that we consider that contribute the most to our privacy, or also we can activate the encryption of the synchronized data, where the only way to access them is through the password of our Google account.
Encrypt your data
Many of today’s phones encrypt stored data by default, however it never hurts to check. To do this, we must go to the “Setting”Of the device, and look in the section of“Security, location or configuration“The option that says”Lock screen and security “. There, we must see an encryption option, in case of having an SD card we can encrypt it so that they can be protected all data stored in it.
Secure your network
If we have a wireless Internet connection we must improve the security of it, because a low security system, can be the epicenter of all attacks to our devices connected to the network. For this reason, we recommend entering the router configuration and change all the factory settings, such as name and password. Our encryption system must be WPA2-PSK, since it is the best level of protection that we can establish.
Like everything else, the update eliminates errors and vulnerabilities, so we must always realize that our connection has its updated firmware. The networks wireless They are essential, because it is through them that more information is loaded and downloaded. If they are attacked, it would be a total danger to our privacy. That being said, we must strengthen our networks, if we want to live safe.