This is the fifth post in a series about data breaches you can prevent. We’ve covered Phones and Personal Computing Devices , Your Browser, and Your Inbox, and Your Thumb and External Drives. Next we’ll discuss Your Old Windows 95 Computer.

Technology has made it easier than ever to be a digital pack rat. Cheap and plentiful memory probably means that you have backed-up a copy of your old 256 MB hard drive, which you also have stashed somewhere in your basement. Before blindly making back-up copies of old hard drives, make sure that you first delete any information you don’t want to save.

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This post is the fourth in a series about data breaches you can prevent. We’ve covered Phones and Personal Computing Devices , Your Browser, and Your Inbox. Here we’ll explore Your Thumb and External Drives.

Just about anything that can store information can be used to store sensitive personal information. Whether you use an external drive to back up sensitive data, or use a thumb drive to transfer large files from one computer to another. The Law of Portable Device Breaches (which I just made up) says that the risk of losing a device, and the information thereon, is directly proportional to its portability. In real terms, this extremely scientific law means that you’re more likely to leave your cell phone at the bar than your desktop computer.

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This post is the second in a series about data breaches you can prevent. We’ve already covered Phones and Personal Computing Devices. The next source we’ll explore is Your Browser.

Laptops, desktop computers and smartphones all have built-in internet browsers. A typical browser can store hundreds of passwords and usernames, credit card numbers, contact information, and browsing history. Even though we use our smart phone browsers to do a significant number of online transactions, typical smart phone browsers do not allow users the same degree of privacy control as desktop browsers.

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This post is the first in a series about preventable data breaches. Most Americans have received a letter, telling them that their personal information has been breached. But there are many breaches you’ll never hear about, and many of them are right under your nose. The first source we’ll explore is Your Phone and Personal Computing Device.

Remember when cell phones were telephones? Those days are long gone. The current generation of smart phones are powerful computing devices which just happen to also make phone calls.

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