What are your plans this week? We hope taking the time to clean out your Inbox is one of the tasks on your to-do list. This week marks “Clean Out Your Inbox Week” and Tuesday, January 28th is also “Data Privacy Day”.
In the fast-paced world we live in, our inboxes can very easily get over-crowded with messages of all kinds from various senders. It’s good practice to clean out your inbox periodically. A good place to start is by sorting your messages in reverse chronological order by date … quickly scan down the list of messages and remove any that are no longer pertinent. Sorting by date can help you see how long it has been since you last cleaned out your inbox and is a quick way to clean things up. If messages from more than a year ago appear – chances are you can remove them or file them into a subfolder for safekeeping if they are things you really need to keep.
Data Privacy on the other hand – is a whole different topic. In the technology age, we live in, protecting our privacy and the privacy of others is first and foremost. Please consider any private data that you have access to at work but also consider what you store on your personal computer at home. Where is your private data stored? Is it secure “at rest” and “in transit”? Is it regularly backed up and is your back-up device secure? Do you still need all of the data you are storing? If you have ever been affected by a data breach – you know how it feels to be on the receiving end of a data privacy lapse. However, you would never want to be the “cause” of a data breach so take great caution and care to protect the data that has been entrusted to you.
An article published by Secure Magazine outlines the Top 12 data breaches for 2019. You may want to review this article to see if any of the breaches are relevant to you or a family member.
There is no such thing as being “overly cautious” when it comes to one’s privacy and protecting data so take a peek at your inbox this week and do some “spring cleaning” and be cognizant of your privacy and the privacy of others.