The weather is warming up and flowers are beginning to bloom, and that puts many people in mind to start spring cleaning!  While you’re scrubbing out the refrigerator, vacuuming under all the beds, and washing the drapes, consider taking your spring cleaning online as well.

You might start with your online subscriptions.  How many do you have and how many of those do you use?  Did you sign up for a free trial and forget to cancel it?  Take stock of what you’re paying for and you just might find some hidden cash you can reclaim!

And speaking of clearing out, how’s your inbox looking these days?  We’ve all been shopping online so much in the past year, you’ve probably given out your email address to several places in exchange for discounts or free shipping.  Are they now clogging up your inbox with weekly emails that are no use to you?  It only takes a few minutes to go through and unsubscribe!

How about your social media profiles?  With everything going online, it’s quite likely that your online social circles have expanded.  This is a great time to double check that you have work contacts and personal contacts separated to avoid awkward cross-sharing, and maybe to thin out the ranks of your online “friends” you don’t talk to. 

Check up on all your security settings as well, not only on social media but in your email accounts.  Enable two factor authentication to secure your email, write down those long authentication codes, and take a stroll through your Gmail account settings to control your data privacy.  While you’re at it, are your passwords strong enough?  Maybe create some new, stronger ones.

Clean living online means peace of mind in all your online interactions!

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A strong password can make the difference between a secure online account and your information being sold across the internet.  Most sites now have strict requirements that passwords meet a certain level of strength, usually by requiring a certain number of characters and including capital letters, numbers, or special characters.  If you feel a bit overwhelmed by all this, you’re not alone. Here are a few tips for creating strong passwords.

1. Use phrases instead of words.  The more characters, the stronger your password.  So use a full phrase like 6RosesinMyGarden! or Familyof3?Dogs instead of trying to stretch out a single word. 
2. Sprinkle your numbers and special characters throughout your password.  It’s very common to tack a number or special character onto the end of a password (who hasn’t ended a password with 1!), but that makes it easier to hack.  Remember that you can put numbers and special characters anywhere in your passphrase.
3. There are more than two special characters!  Sure, the exclamation and question marks are the easiest to think of, but there are lots more special characters to choose from.  Some sites don’t allow use of “@” or commas in passwords, but you can almost always use “$” or “&”.  That ampersand can be especially useful in creating longer phrases you can easily remember.
4. Don’t use significant dates.  Never use your birthday, your kids’ birthdays, your age, or the current year in a password.  The only exception there is if you use a system that requires you to change your password regularly, in which case you might use the current year when you reset it.
5. Archaic words are a good choice, too!  Lots of archaic words are long and many are such fun to say that you won’t forget them.  Words like “snollygoster”, “fandangle”, or “rapscallion” can make great foundations for passwords and are unlikely to be on any list of often-hacked choices.  If you’re especially literary-minded, try a Shakespearean insult generator for some fun ideas.  

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We’ve all been using the internet for so long now that we fancy ourselves pretty savvy about potential scams.  After all, nobody would believe the old “Nigerian prince” thing anymore and we all know not to open emails from unfamiliar email addresses, right?  Surely we’re all safe.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case.  As the public has become better informed and more careful online, scammers have gotten more inventive.  There are new scams out there that you need to be aware of.

There’s free wi-fi everywhere these days.  It’s become so common that we expect it from restaurants, bars, and other businesses.  Some ISPs even set up public hotspots on their own.  However, bad actors can set up those innocent-looking hotspots, too.  And once you connect to them, your data is ripe for the picking.  A little common sense goes a long way in this situation.  Make sure you know the network you’re connecting to and make it a rule to never do any shopping or banking over a public wi-fi connection.  For extra protection, you might consider getting a VPN to safeguard your private information.

The tried and true pop-up is still out there, waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting.  Sometimes, you’ll see the old warning that your computer is infected (click on that and it certainly will be!), but modern pop-ups tend to be ads that then redirect you to a dangerous site.  Hopefully, your antivirus will catch the redirect and block the threat, but an ad blocker is a more reliable way to keep pop-ups off your screen. 

The newest email scams are designed to look legitimate and use subject lines that scare you into acting before you think.  A couple of examples include messages with the headline “Your Paypal account has been suspended” or “Your Apple ID has been locked”.  Both of these common scams come from senders that show up as “Paypal” or “Apple”.  But the sender name to anything when an email account is created.  When you hover over the sender name, you see the full email address is nowhere near real.  Keep calm, don’t lose your head, and always check the email before you open any email that says your account is in trouble.

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One of the more disturbing trends on the internet is the phenomenon of targeted advertising.  After you search for something, suddenly you find ads for your search on every page you visit, sometimes for days or even weeks at a time. 

This is all thanks to Google.  When you use Google’s search engine, it collects that information and curates the ads you see from various retailers and service providers.  If that thought bothers you, not to worry!  You can clear your Google search history with a few simple steps.

There are two methods for clearing your search history.

Method 1:

1. Go to myactivity.google.com and make sure you’re signed in with your Google account.
2.  Choose “Delete activity by” from the left-hand sidebar.
3. In the form provided, first choose your date range, then go to the drop-down menu labeled “All Products” and choose “search”.
4. Click “delete”.

Method 2:

1.  Go to the Google homepage while you’re logged into your Google account.
2. Click on “Settings”, then “Your data in search”.
3. Choose either to review your search history, delete your search history from the last hour, or delete all your search history all the way back to 2005.

Deleting your search history isn’t strictly necessary, but it will keep Google from being able to target your ads.  Not only that, regularly clearing your search history will also help keep your internet activity private and protect your personal information. 

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One of the simplest and most effective procedures for troubleshooting your internet issues is clearing your browser cache.  This operation can speed up loading time, correct browser errors, and it usually fixes that annoying problem when the site you use all the time suddenly won’t load.  The words “clear your cache” strike fear in a lot of people, but it’s really very simple.  Here’s an example of how to clear your cache using the world’s most widely used browser, Chrome.

To clear your cache, first open up the browser menu by clicking on the three dots in the upper right corner of your browser window.  In that window, choose “History” – this will open up a side menu where you’ll click on “History” again to open a new browser tab.

In this new tab, look on the left side of the screen and click on “Clear browsing data” (don’t worry, you’ll get to choose what you clear and what you keep).  This will bring up a pop-up window that gives you a lot of options.

First, choose your time frame.  The default choice is the last seven days, but you can change it to as little as the last hour, as much as the last four weeks, or even “all time”.  Seven days is usually sufficient, but if you’ve never cleared your cache before, you might start at four weeks.

Below that, you’ll see three check boxes noting the data that you can clear.  These will include “browsing history”, which means the URLs of all the websites you’ve visited, “cookies and other site data”, which will clear any saved login information or account settings, and “cached images and files”, which are pieces of information that your browser has kept to pre-load various websites.  This last option, “cached images and files”, is what you want to clear, so you can uncheck the other two boxes.

Then just click on the “clear data” button at the bottom, and you’re done!  Close and re-open your browser, and see how much faster and easier your websites load.  If you were having trouble with a specific site not loading, this will likely fix the issue.  And you didn’t even have to call tech support!

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