Have you ever questioned how the dress you Google searched yesterday is now on one of the many clothing advertisements breaking up your social media feed? This event is most likely a result of you not changing the default settings on your phone or Google accounts, so your searches, conversations, browsing, etc. is being passed on to other companies.
Do you have a password on your home WiFi? Is there a PIN to unlock your cell phone? Do you have two factor authentication enabled for logging into your bank account online? A troubling amount of people genuinely don’t think twice about the importance of privacy or how detrimental a leak of "their" information could be. Truth is, it could take years for one to recover from personal information/identity being stolen.
Dan Svirsky, a Harvard graduate, was curious about just how many people took time to really think about their privacy and recently conducted an experiment to research it. The results were surprisingly interesting!
The test consisted of participants partaking in surveys for some type of monetary reward. He pushed the research further by offering a bonus for people who would share their Facebook profile data. Around 64% refused this, and when he upped the amount of the bonus by $2.00, still around 50% refused this. The test concluded that people do think about privacy when it’s in their faces, but when it comes to regular day to day protection, the unconscious effort of privacy vanishes.
As members of an expansive DOD supply chain, it is easy to forget how mundane behaviors could expose your company. In a rapidly evolving technological world, doing things as small as changing default settings and making complex passwords is crucial to combat unethical hacking. Interested in learning more about locking down your company’s exposure points in an effort to maintain NIST compliance? Check out www.neqterlabs.com to try a free demo and see how we can help you outsmart hackers with cybersecurity best practices.
