By Kavita Mistry 
In today’s digital age, where companies are data-hungry to train AI models, serve ads, and get us hooked on their apps, it is of utmost importance to safeguard our personal data. It includes pictures, videos, documents, and everything related to our personal lives.
When we don’t give much thought to data privacy and security, we store the data at our convenience, devoid of any thought about anything. However, when we start to look into privacy matters that concern our personal data, the options to store the data come down to a few. Our data on the internet is constantly prone to hacking, data breaches, identity theft, and so on.
We need to be absolutely strict and careful while sharing and storing our personal data. These days, when companies use everything to train emerging AI models, safeguarding personal data is a non-negotiable act. This guide explores the safe practices we can employ in storing our data and where it can be stored safely for safety and privacy from unwanted access by anyone.
First Up, What Is Personal Data?
When we create an email account on Google or any other service provider, we normally enter our name, date of birth, an image to set as a profile picture, and even addresses, too, at times. Our personal data starts from here. We send and receive emails regarding personal and professional tasks. We use the same email account to sign up for various online services and social media platforms. In the process, we even give away our phone numbers to make the accounts more secure.
Once we start using a social media account, we upload our pictures, create posts, write personal things, and update profiles with our details to connect with real-life friends online. Everything is data. The way we interact with the social media platforms, the way we use the websites, apps, etc. In general, we do not have much control over these, except for the details we update or the media we upload.
On our personal gadgets like smartphones, we capture images and shoot videos of our family, friends, and the things that attract us. Over time, these all accumulate and become a huge chunk that our devices may run out of storage.
Then, we have personal identifier data like national IDs, passport data, driving license, contact details, banking information, credit and debit card details, tax information, health information, health records, health insurance, life insurance, biometrics, legal documents, etc.
Being careless with this kind of information and data costs us a lot. Let’s see how we can store and safeguard our data from third-party access.
Where Can I Store My Personal Data Safely?
Before we get into storing our data, we need to decide on essential and non-essential data. Personal information like national IDs, banking data, and health data is essential, and it is important that they are easily accessible. It is fine even if we cannot access old media at the speed of our thoughts, as we rarely feel like seeing them. We suggest different ways to store data based on essential and non-essential categorizations.
Local Drives
One of the simplest and safest ways to store personal data is on local drives, ideally on an external drive. The media files that accumulate on your personal gadgets can be stored on local drives. Whenever you need to access them, you can connect the drive to your personal PC, and access, and copy the needed files.
Storing essential data on local drives is not recommended, as they are not accessible over the internet when needed. Local drives are a great way to store pictures, videos, and other memories and keep them drive aside safely in our homes.
The flip side of using local drives is that they need to be handled with care. They are prone to corruption and damage even with little mismanagement. When you can take care of local drives and handle them well, you may go for local drives.
Cloud Storage
There are various cloud storage options available for free and with a subscription. When you sign up for Google, you get a free storage of 15GB with every Google account. You can use it to store the essential and non-essential data that you need to access. Google encrypts the files uploaded to Google Drive automatically, but you cannot rely on it with sensitive files, as they have access to the keys. Though there have been no data breaches with Google in recent years, it is better to safeguard your sensitive data. This applies to all other free cloud storage, like OneDrive, as well.
Still, we can use Google Drive to store non-essential personal data with some safety measures. Collect all your non-essential data that you do not access regularly on your PC. Then sort them by deleting duplicates or waste files. You can now zip the entire folder and set a password for the folder using 7-Zip or other archiving programs. Set a strong password that includes multiple characters and save it in a password manager. You can safely upload the password-protected zip file onto free cloud storage like Google Drive and store it there as long as you want.
For sensitive documents that you need to access when needed, you can upload them to ProtonDrive by creating a Proton account. With each free Proton account, you get 1GB of storage space, which is sufficient to store important documents that we need to access instantly when the need arises.
If you are okay with paying a subscription fee to store data and access it whenever you want, you can subscribe to Proton, Sync.com, NordLocker, etc., and get storage with the best encryption.
NAS Drives
If you have a huge amount of data about you and your family and do not want to rely on third-party services, you can opt for NAS drives. They are one of the efficient ways to store data and access it whenever you want on the internet. You have complete control over your data, can increase storage as you need, and implement backup measures if you need to safeguard your data from loss.
The biggest advantage of NAS drives is that they can be accessed remotely over the internet. If you opt for NAS devices from some of the best brands like Synology, QNAP, etc., you get to enjoy AES-256 encryption of your data. You can tweak the encryption level from the file to the entire storage level based on your preferences.
You can opt for the following NAS Drives and secure your data.
QNAP TS-264-8G-24ST-US 2 Bay High-Performance Desktop NAS
Recommended practices to safeguard NAS and the data on it:
- Ensure you set strong and unique passwords, and enable two-factor authentication
- Make sure you enable full drive encryption and store encryption keys in a password manager safely
- Maintain backups regularly with the available options
- Keep NAS software up to date to avoid vulnerabilities
- Monitor your NAS drives regularly
Password Managers
We all have many passwords related to online accounts, bank accounts, and other services we use. To remember them easily, we ignore the safe practices and set a simple and easy-to-remember password and reuse it for all the accounts. It puts all our online accounts at risk, as all the passwords are the same. To make sure you set strong passwords and do not remember them, you can use a password manager like Bitwarden for free. Using password managers, you can generate strong passwords and save them for access when needed. If you give the necessary permission, they automatically fill in the passwords when you enter the master password.
In addition to that, you can save sensitive information like banking details, credit, and debit card details on them and securely access them when needed. If you subscribe to a premium plan, you can even upload sensitive documents, store them, and access them whenever you need. All you need to do is create an entry on the vault in Bitwarden Password Manager and select Attachments.
Using password managers is one of the safest methods to safeguard personal data, as well as online accounts that carry personal data.
Best Practices to Protect Personal Data
To protect personal data from falling into the hands of bad actors, we need to be strict with how we deal with our data. These are some of the best practices to protect your personal data.
1. Use strong and unique passwords: Whenever you create an account online, create a strong and unique password that contains lowercase, uppercase, numbers, and symbols. Make sure to have at least 10-12 characters in the passwords. The longer the password with unique characters, the stronger it becomes. You can use password managers to generate strong and unique passwords for every online account you create.
2. Change passwords regularly: Changing passwords to your online accounts regularly every 3-6 months, makes our online accounts safe even when there is a data breach with the services we use. Relying on the same password for years without changing it makes it weak, given the regular data breaches that happen.
3. Use a password manager: A password manager is a must in today’s times. It not only helps you generate strong passwords, and save them securely but also lets you not give much thought about remembering the passwords related to each service you use online. All you need to remember is a master password that unlocks the password manager. You can even use biometrics to unlock the password manager when there is a scope.
4. Enable 2FA on every online account: We have two ways to protect accounts online. One is with the password, and another is with 2FA or two-factor authentication. Every trusted online service gives us an option to enable 2FA with our phone number or 2FA apps like Authy, Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, etc. Install one of the trusted authenticator apps and use it to enable 2FA and safeguard your accounts.
5. Use only end-to-end encrypted services: Encryption is one of the recommended ways to safeguard any data. It prevents others without keys from reading into the data. Every service we use has some policies, and they mention the encryption and user privacy policies. Read them and decide if you need to use that service or not.
6. Stop posting personal information on Social media: Social media is arguably one of the best ways to stay connected with friends and make new friendships. But oversharing personal information, and posting media related to personal life is not recommended. Given the AI boom, social media platforms are using personal data to train their AI models. Limiting personal information on social media platforms is a must.
7. Opt for privacy-focused services: There are services online that focus on user privacy more than anything, like Proton. Using such services lets you safeguard your data and enables you to avoid data-hungry services.
8. Monitor permissions on apps you install: The apps we install on our devices, especially on Android, ask for certain permissions even when they do not need them. When we ignorantly give those permissions, they collect our data, including contacts, messages, etc. The predatory loan apps in India collect and upload even media to their services to harass customers if they fail to repay. Beware of such apps and monitor permissions regularly.
Keep Personal Data Secure
With the competition in creating the best AI models, companies are more data-hungry than ever. It is very important to keep our personal data safe. Using safe practices and limiting the sharing of our information online when not necessary keeps our data in check. Sensitive and essential details are more prone to attacks as they hold the worth of our entire lives. Make sure you use the trusted services and follow recommended safety practices.