A journalist walks into a bar along with a hacker and a spoofing device, and proceeds to sneak into people’s computers and then google them for their publicly-available personal information. If you’re intrigued and need a reason to clean up your social media profiles (do you really want to have your vacation photos set to “public”?), read on the article by Maurits Martijn.

Unfortunately, the article falls short of giving any advice to avoid all this, other than “don’t use public WiFi”. The cool guys at Sophos have these short tips:

1) Get out of the habit of remembering Wi-Fi networks. If your computer automatically joins networks based only on their names, you may end up connected to imposter networks you didn’t realise were there.
2) Turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth when you’re not using them. You can also use “flight mode” (although you won’t be able to receive calls in flight mode).
3) Consider using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) when you are on the road. This ‘tunnels’ all your traffic back to your home network, strongly encrypted, from wherever you are. It’s slightly less convenient but much safer, because it makes it harder for a rogue Wi-Fi access point to work out what you are up to.
4) Download the free Sophos UTM Home Edition. It comes with a VPN for both iOS and Android.
5) Your apps such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram use geo-tagging. Turn geo-tagging off if you don’t want to give away your location.

Here are also some suggestions from GizMag.

So, are you scared enough? Would you change anything in what/how you share information? :)

(Illustration by Kristina Collantes)