Data Privacy Day 2022: Check top 5 measures to protect your privacy

Data Privacy Day 2022: Due to an increase in cyber or online crime and frauds it is important to safeguard your privacy. Here are top 5 measures that can be used.

Data Privacy Day 2022: Here is how you can protect your privacy. (Pixabay)

Data privacy has become one of the most discussed topics in recent times especially with the increase in the number of cybercrimes in the wake of the pandemic that caused a greater part of the world to go digital in most walks of life. Due to the Covid-19, everyone has been compelled to join the online world. However, may it be small children or old age people, protecting data is a major concern when almost everything is available online and can be accessed with just a few clicks.

From chatting apps to making payments to education and a lot more, everything is being done with the help of the internet and applications, websites, etc. on your phone, laptop and desktop. But in order to avail the online services you are required to provide your basic details like name, address, location, and sometimes even your bank details. Today, January 28 is being celebrated as Data Privacy Day and here we will be informing you about top 5 measures that have been taken to protect your privacy.

Before that it should be noted that privacy is so important an issue that it has been declared a fundamental right of a citizen. It ensures online safety for the individual. And Data Privacy Day is celebrated to spread awareness about the same. Failure in safeguarding one's privacy could not only result in financial losses but can also result in exploitation.

WhatsApp, Telegram, Paytm, etc, are some of the most widely used applications. In order to safeguard themselves and their subscribers, companies like these have rolled out several security features like end-to-end encryption, safety locks, etc.

Therefore, on this Data Privacy Day, here are some of the measures that have been adopted by tech companies and mobile manufacturers in order to protect and safeguard your privacy, but you have to ensure these are enabled on your gadgets:

1. Biometric lock or face ID to unlock your phone: Your smartphone comes with a number of ways of unlocking it. And in order to ensure it does not land up in wrong hands, other than keeping a pattern or number lock you can use fingerprints and face Id as a way to unlock your phone.

2. Two-Step verification: This is available in applications like WhatsApp, Facebook, Gmail, etc. and helps users add an extra layer of security.

3. Disappearing messages: WhatsApp has launched this feature to let users send messages that will disappear after 7 days, once enabled. The messaging application launched the ‘view once' feature that makes photos and videos disappear after they have been opened. While another application, Telegram supports self-destructing messag.es.

4. Security pin: Other than the main way to unlock your phone you can use different security pins to open applications like Paytm, Google Pay, etc. This has been done in order to ensure that even if your phone gets unlocked by someone, they cannot easily access the payment making applications on your phone.

5. Forward limits: WhatsApp has set a limit on forwarding messages to just five chats at once. This step has been taken to check the spread of misinformation.