How to Keep Your Home Made Porn Safe?

Contrary to popular believe there is a lot you can do to protect yourself from having your intimate pictures and videos stolen.  The first thing is STOP PUTTING THEM ON THE INTERNET.  When you save those files to that fancy Mac computer it uploads them to iCloud to back them up (Windows users, don’t get smug, there’s plenty of services to do this on Windows as well).  This means that they are on the Internet.  At this point you are asking for trouble.  If it is on the Internet you can assume that someone is going to attempt to find it and share it.

If you are going to put the files on the Internet via iCloud, DropBox, Cubby, etc. then encrypt the files.  If they are encrypted it will be a LOT harder for someone who downloads them to view them.  They can share them all they want, but without your encryption key they won’t be able to see the data in the files.  Now if you aren’t involved in technology this probably sounds pretty hard, and it can be but if you’ve got files that you really don’t want to have out there for the public to view, then it’s probably worth an afternoon of your time to learn about this stuff so that you can protect yourself.  Do some reading, take a class at the local community college, buy my book, there’s lots of options available to you.

If you have these sorts of pictures and videos that you don’t want online, grab an old computer, disconnect it from the Internet, and put the files on there.  Use this machine for only those files, and never connect it to the Internet.  Odds are you don’t plan on sharing those files with anyone besides yourself, so having them on a computer which can’t get on the Internet probably isn’t a big deal.  If you loose those files is it that much of a problem?  After all you can always take new ones, and that’s most of the fun anyway, right?

After you’ve got your files encrypted you still need to do things like put a pin number on your cell phone, put passwords on all of your computers (especially that one with the naughty pictures on it), and use two factor authentication for everything that allows you to including your email, blogs, websites, banks, etc.  Of all of these your email is the most important one to have two factor authentication for, as this is where all the other services will send password reset messages to.

Now for the love of god, remove all those pictures from the Internet before you do anything else.

Stop Posting Pictures of Credit Cards Online

So apparently there’s something which I should have included in the book but didn’t because I figured it was so obvious that it didn’t require actually saying. Do NOT take pictures of your credit cards and post them online.  I mean really, why on earth would you think that it’s a good idea to post all the information that people need to steal your identity?  Below is a screenshot of just a couple of pictures that people have posted on Twitter about their new credit cards that they just got.

cardsApparently this problem is so common that someone has actually made a twitter account that retweets these peoples pictures.  The bio for this twitter account simply reads “Please quit posting pictures of your debit cards, people”.  The sad thing is that most of the pictures that this account has retweeted are still out there on twitter.  My favorite is the one in the picture that actually includes the security code from the back of the card (which is conveniently his (Fred’s) birthday).  Give that he’s in his early 20’s that narrows down the year of his birth to just a few options in the mid 1990s so he’s just given out basically everything needed to take over his PayPal account and card.

I’m guessing that when there’s fraud on these cards the people that post these pictures are shocked that all their money has been stolen.

So apparently rule #1 of data privacy, don’t take a picture of your credit cards and post them online has to actually be written down.

Hopefully these people will quickly figure out that this is a bad plan and remove the pictures and never do something so stupid again.  Based on their pictures on twitter they all appear to be younger folks in their early 20’s.  Now I remember back to my early 20’s and I was pretty stupid but I can’t imagine that I would have ever freely given my credit card number to what amounts to basically every person on the planet.  Those 16 little numbers are magic in that they give someone your money.  Keep them to yourselves.

Denny

P.S. Yes I realize that I haven’t blocked out the card numbers in the screenshot.  I’m working under the assumption that the cards are already canceled as the accounts have been drained by now.


http://basicsofdigitalprivacy.com

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