How To Protect Your Online Accounts
You probably have at least one account created on some website. It can be a Google account for your Gmail, Apple ID for your iPhone, or one of the popular social media accounts like Facebook or Twitter. People are always complaining about how unsafe it is to put your personal information online, but many do not know that there is an effective way to protect your online privacy.
Essential part of cloud computing
I believe that the future of personal computing lies in the cloud, but there are people who disagree, mostly because of privacy concerns. Periodical hacking attacks and massive leaks of user information surely support the argument that cloud is a dangerous place to keep your personal information.
Cloud computing provides a huge variety of advantages for using your devices, but there are some privacy concerns. There is no a perfect way to protect your information in the cloud, but there is one thing every user should do to dramatically increase the level of protection for it — two-step verification.
How two-step verification works
Two-step verification (or two-factor authorization) will let you add an additional layer of protection to you online accounts. You have to provide your mobile phone number for you account, so every time you log in using an unidentified computing device, you will receive a confirmation code to you phone, without which you won’t be able to log in into you account. Simple, but very efficient.
In addition to providing the extra protection to your account, two-step verification also plays a role of a notifier when somebody tries to access your account without you knowing about it. When somebody enters your password, you will get a sms message with a security code, which basically means you should login to your account and change your password as soon as possible.
With constant leaks of user passwords all around the internet, it is not that unusual when somebody ends up knowing your password, but with two-step verification this person won’t be able to log in into your account.
Conclusion
I believe that cloud based technologies are the future of personal computing, and I am sure that more and more companies will concentrate on bringing their services to the cloud. Users should put more effort to protecting their privacy, starting with enabling the two-step verification for their internet accounts.
Most of the companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook or Twitter, already provide the option to enable two-step verification, so I strongly advise you to visit the settings section of your account and enable two-step verification right now.
