Gadgetory

welcome back to Android QA my name is Jace and this is where we try and answer your most pressing Android questions and imagine for a moment if you are now a new dad for the first time and your wife is just heroically giving birth to your first child and someone captures this precious moment yeah you're going to be enjoying that photo for many years to come right no because your data has been wiped from the cloud wiped from your hard drives gone you my friend have been hacked happens every day and the problem is people don't know what a real threat and what's just fear-mongering there's the NSA really reading your text when it comes to privacy and security what is a real threat that more coming up don't worry we're going to take care of you all right so my dear friends please meet mat Honan and if you haven't heard of mat story before in his own words he says in the space of one hour his complete digital life was destroyed first my Google account was taken over then deleted next my Twitter account was compromised and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages worst of all my Apple ID account was broken into and my hackers used it to remotely erase all my data on my phone my tablet and my computer you see Matt made the mistake of leaving himself very vulnerable but to be fair how many of us do all the same things in many ways this was all my fault my accounts were daisy chained together getting into Amazon let my hackers into Apple ID account which helped them get into my gmail which gave them access to my Twitter had I use two-factor authentication for my Google account it's possible that none of this would have happened because their ultimate goal was to take over my Twitter account and wreak havoc lulz so Matt lost many of his most precious digital items because of what's called social engineering what is social engineering social engineering is the process by which a hacker must go through to guess your passwords for your social media profiles so of course you're not silly enough to put out your password or post your password somewhere that can be hacked but you do provide public information about your birthday your children's names your children's birthdays where you went for your honeymoon vacation for example information that is often used in passwords so once they gather this information they put it through a program that will generate possible passwords they try hundreds of thousands of combinations until they find the right one that's the process of social engineering so if you're one of those people who think that this is too far-fetched and difficult for a hacker to do oh how naive you are check out the most popular passwords for 2013 it doesn't inspire confidence my personal favorites 1 2 3 4 5 6 password 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 and I love you all right let's get real practical and talk about the top three things we all need to do to protect our passwords seriously you got to start doing them because you can't come back to me and complain that you lost your favorite pic of you and Luke Perry Luke Perry's probably glad they're gone so not only should you not use any of these simple passwords but you don't want to use anything that could be socially engineered like your pet's name the name of your child your birthday or any birthday of a family member number two do use alphanumeric case-sensitive combinations instead of using Jace loves tech you want to make it complicated enough that it's extremely hard for any hacker to deduce and meaningful enough for you to remember so one serious geek is a better example because it not only uses eight characters lots of alphanumeric combinations but it's relevant to me now if you feel that that password is too complicated to remember that brings us to our third and final point you really need to consider using a password protection program like LastPass now LastPass does not sponsor the show that'll pay me anything to say this you can use other programs that are free some are premium I know LastPass and what LastPass does and other programs like it is that they take one secure password you only have to remember one very secure password like the option I gave you earlier and it generates passwords on its own for all your social media profiles you don't need to remember them LastPass does that for you super super helpful and secure so now it does leave you vulnerable with that one password if someone gets to that password you're in deep deep trouble that's why you need to follow those guidelines in creating a super secure password now of course there is two-factor authentication when it comes to using Google services and that is very secure very helpful I do recommend that I don't use it personally though because it is a massive pain in the butt it's very time consuming so you guys going to make your own judgment call there so now we come to Big Brother his Big Brother watching you do they care to read your text to your mother well yes sort of it works a little something like this documents obtained by The Washington Post indicate that the National Security Agency is collecting billions of records a day to track the location of mobile phone users around the old the NSA collects this location and travel habit data in order to target development to find unknown associates of targets it already knows about to accomplish this the NSA compiles information on a vast database of devices and their locations most of these collected by definition are suspected of no wrongdoing officials say they do not purposely collect us a phone locations in bulk but a large number are swept up incidentally so to translate that a little bit for you know there is no individual person on a phone or computer reading or watching your text in real time but they are collecting your data all of it not just US citizens everyone everywhere for what well they don't really know but they want all this information that they consist and process through to find targeted information but as the Washington Post found out they're not just using it just for anti-terrorist activities they're using it for anything they want there is no privacy privacy is done now comes the question what do you do about it become Survivorman live off the grid learn how to create a file with a bow-drill yeah go hardcore like to work and only a little bit more practical is the private browsing option in Firefox the incognito mode extension for Chrome and the in private browsing option feature for Internet Explorer now I did quite a bit of research and reading on this and there's a number of different avenues that you can take to increase your privacy a little bit but I gotta tell you I gotta be frank there's really not much you can do as an individual to change this the NSA and government agencies like them just have way too much money way too much resources and the political will to find out what they want to find out the real solution is to change the culture and change the political will and make privacy a priority because right now it's not so y'all know I can't end on a sour note like that so when I feel depressed and down I turn to one thing puppies thanks for watching Android army my name is Jace I would love to connect with you right here on Google+ or Twitter read all my comments out replies yeah tell me what you think of today's show and don't forget about my brothers in Android they work really hard we have an awesome team now we are about to hit a million subs people a million subs that is more than 500,000 subs in the year that I've been here this is my one-year anniversary now yeah don't forget about my brothers in Android jaws gentlemen tech ninja Kevin LAN and Chris all working really hard to deliver the best and direct content of the web I should see you next week on Android QA