Electronic Frontiers Australia, the premier digital rights body promoting and protecting digital rights since 1994, encourages everyone to support Privacy Awareness Week 2019.
The Office of the Australian Privacy Commissioner has created a dedicated website for Privacy Awareness Week 2019 with the theme Don’t Be In The Dark. It contains a variety of useful information we encourage people to read.
Here are three things to do this week:
- Get a password manager.
- Review your Facebook settings.
- Turn on two-factor (2FA) authentication.
Get A Password Manager
A password manager, such as 1Password, Lastpass, or KeePass help you to have a unique, strong password for every website you visit. That way, if one of the sites loses your password in a data breach, an attacker can’t use that same password to access your internet banking or your email. ABC’s The Checkout program has a great segment explaining password managers here.
Review Your Facebook Settings
If you still have a Facebook account, despite its repeated privacy problems, now would be a great time to check your settings and make sure you’re not oversharing. Consumer Reports, a US publication similar to the local Choice magazine has a handy guide on where to start here.
Two Factor Authentication
Often abbreviated 2FA (and sometimes MFA, or multi-factor authentication) this is where you have to enter your username and password, and then enter a special code, in order to log in to a website or service. Banks often have this, and so does MyGov.
The one service you should definitely turn on 2FA for is your email account. If you forget your password on other sites, the password reset email is sent here, so if someone else manages to get into your email account, they could potentially get access to every other account you have by resetting all your passwords. 2FA makes this much, much harder to achieve.
Here’s EFA organisation member Fastmail’s explanation of how to use 2FA. Here’s Google’s explanation of how to use 2FA for Gmail. And here’s Microsoft’s explanation of how to use 2FA for Office365.
Media Contact
media@efa.org.au