This article was originally posted by me in Brazilian Portuguese on Medium and here comes a English translation.

Digital privacy is one of the main points within our connected life, and this is as important as remembering to lock the house when you go out.

This week NerdTech’s addressed the topic of Digital Self-Defense. How can we protect ourselves from possible unforeseen events such as theft, loss of password, attacks and scams? This was aborted in recent weeks due to the large cases of cell phone theft in Brazil — not to sell them, but to steal users’ bank details! Two podcasts that I also listen to also addressed this. They were Área de Tranferência and MacMagazine no Ar.

For this reason, decide to gather in this post some of the main measures that we can take to prevent ourselves from these problems.

The will remain divided into a numbered list, but there is no ranking of which measure taken is better or worse. Follow them all!

  1. NEVER leave your passwords easily accessible within a notepad, or an application that is easy to find, and try your best to diversify for each application you use.

  2. Use a service that aggregates your passwords in a safe place, such as OnePassword, Passwords by Apple, a kind of “digital vault”. (Just don’t forget the password to that vault! 🤦‍♂️).

  3. A good tip that complements the previous one is to share this password between two trusted people. Half with one, half with someone else. In case you passed away (no one know tomorrow day).

  4. Be very careful with your passwords and e-mails, and ALWAYS use two-step authentication.

  5. Do not inform confidential data, such as card password, or anything else through calls that you have received. This also applies to informing the account recovery numbers that arrive in your SMS number or email, to other people who called to you.

  6. If your cell phone is stolen, try to be as quick as possible to block access to all your accounts, or even the device.

  7. Disable the reading of messages, emails and other on blocked screen. If your cell phone is stolen, the thief will not be able to see a possible message with an account recovery code.

  8. Do not add locations such as “Home”, “Work”, and others to your geolocation applications (Google Maps, Apple Maps). Try to be as discreet as possible when it comes to geolocation, in case of hacker attacks.

  9. This also applies to your contact list, do not leave contacts like “Mom”, “Dad”, “Brother”, in your list. This will make life easier for criminals when it comes to further.

  10. Check out about disk encryption. If your notebook is stolen, it can be easily opened and your data inside the Hard Drive exposed.

These were the Top 10 tips that I found interesting to address to this topic.

Share that informations!

Att, Thiago Bertolino.