Evaluating my digital hygiene was an insightful exercise that anyone living in the modern world should make a regular practice. Some of what I found was expected but there were also surprises in learning about unknown tactics that can be used to maintain privacy online.
I started out by downloading Firefox, opening a private browser window, and going to Google. I searched my name using quotes to ensure that it returned only results matching exactly my name. I discovered a plethora of people who share my name, such as a USA basketball player, a special education teacher on LinkedIn, and a digital creator whose site was www.dylantravis.com. This exercise was surprising as I expected to see some results leading to my social media profiles or LinkedIn. This was comforting to me as I would prefer to not have too much information about myself easily available online. Going through the same exercise with DuckDuckGo, surprisingly gave me almost identical results as Google. I didn’t expect anything specific from DuckDuckGo but I did expect to see different results.
As for privacy, I already have a lot of awareness about the privacy settings of my social media apps and iPhone permissions. My Instagram profile was already set to private so that nobody except approved friends could see my profile. I didn’t change any settings here.
Although I am already aware of disabling personalized ads on my iPhone and do so already, I did take a closer look at some of my app permissions. The biggest area I wasn’t previously aware of was Background App Refresh. I had never seen this setting on my iPhone before. When I opened this setting I found that I was giving every app on my iPhone permission to background refresh. I ended up turning this off for every app except for Spotify as I like Spotify always automatically downloading my new liked songs and playlists. I googled this a little further and didn’t see too many downsides of turning this setting off for apps. The biggest reason I see to keep it on is so you can continue where you left off on an app like Reddit or Facebook but this is not important to me. I will try this for a week and see if I notice any problems. I also read I should see an increase in battery life so this setting change could stand to offer me several benefits. I am glad I found this.
One other area I was not aware of until reading the New York Times article, How to Improve Your Mobile Privacy, was awareness of apps that require you to log in via Google or Facebook. I wasn’t able to find any apps that require this that I currently have but I will note this going forward and be more cautious.
As for passwords, I already use the app LastPass to store and generate passwords for me. This app works on desktop as well as mobile and is great at managing security. It alerts you if you have any duplicate passwords and will help you regenerate new ones as needed. The only downside to LastPass is they recently had an incident where a hacker was able to steal user data. I was informed I was not impacted but this still makes me nervous. I have considered moving to a new password manager such as OnePassoword but this would require a lot of time and hassle.
Undertaking this digital hygiene evaluation has been enlightening, emphasizing the importance of regular online self-audits in today’s digital age. The exercise, filled with some surprises and some expected results, has reinforced my awareness of privacy tactics online. This process not only made me more aware of how easy it is to overlook some important best practices, but it also led me to fine-tune some of my common practices – from tweaking privacy settings to reconsidering app permissions.