Use the Holidays to Educate Family About Online Privacy and Safety Settings
This weekend, The Wall Street Journal ran an article detailing various ways to solve your family’s tech problems for free this holiday season. There are tons of good ideas on the list, but one of the sections that caught my attention was the section on privacy and security. My family is great at calling me and asking simple questions about how to manage their smartphones or “fix” Netflix, but they never ask questions about privacy and security – and they should.
Use the holidays as a time to review your family’s privacy settings on Facebook and other apps and make sure they understand what the settings you choose mean. Depending on your family, they may not be aware that there are privacy settings to begin with. If your grandmother wants to share her messages with the world by all means, make sure she knows she’s determined to share things with everyone, not just friends.
It’s also a good idea to discuss passwords with your family now. Make sure they use something special and unique for each site and service they use, and if that makes sense, see if you can migrate them to a password manager for security.
While we are all susceptible to hacker attacks and network security issues, seniors tend to be less well versed in how to fix them. Using the holidays to talk about a topic can save you the headaches of future problem solving and give everyone the confidence to surf the Internet safely and reliably.
And the rest of this Wall Street Journal article also offers a few other good suggestions, such as showing your family how to increase the font on their phones, put everyone on the latest operating system for their phones and computers, and set up shortcuts for things they often use. …
Just think: the more you do now, the less technical support you will have to do in 2019.