Being a mother is a full-time job in and of itself. It gets even more challenging if you find yourself a single mother. No matter your situation, the fact remains that most people utilize the internet in several different ways throughout their days, such as online dating and social media. Although it may seem like the internet can be a rather innocuous place when you are hosting a relationship online, the fact is that you are placing a vast amount of information online every time you do something as basic as sign up for notifications on a website or post on your social media. For that reason, you need to be aware of how the private information that you place online can come back to haunt you and how you can save your privacy while you’re on the internet building a relationship online or using it for other reasons.
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Make All Your Kids’ Pictures Private
The first step that every parent should take when it comes to maintaining privacy on the internet is marking all of their photos of their children as private. You can show the pictures to your friends or send them to family members, but it is outright dangerous to have pictures of your children with their names on the internet. If someone was so inclined, they could take that information, approach your child after school, and say they were there to pick them up. They know the parents’ names, the child’s name, and much more about the child from examining pictures on social media.
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Date Online and Leave No Evidence on Social Media
As we have said before, a major use of the internet in the present day is online dating. Millions of adults are online looking for love, and many of them are single moms and those who want to meet them. As a mother, if you choose to look for romantic partners on a dedicated website, then you will already be making yourself safer than if you were openly using social media to find dates. Think about it. When you use an online dating service as a single mom, you can go by a screen name to provide a buffer between you and all the people you meet on the website. Moreover, you control who sees that you are in a relationship. That is not the case on social media, where someone can add relationship statuses and such. By creating and maintaining that buffer by dating someone online, you will protect your information and that of your children. Moms date online for this reason and many others, including the opportunity to have better control over the timing of dates. You can get this benefit and many others.
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Close Your Profile to Non-Friends
When you are using social media of any kind, even something like Pinterest, make sure that you make your entire profile private. You don’t want anyone having the opportunity to search for you or stumble upon your profile. Even if they do, then they will not have the chance to see anything that you have posted online, and that will keep you safe.
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Consider Using a VPN
A major development in online privacy and security that has emerged in recent years is called a VPN. The basic concept behind a VPN is that it creates a private network so that you can connect to the public networks with increased privacy. If you spend a lot of time online and have sensitive data, you could use this software.
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Consistently Update Your Software on Phone, Computer, and Tablet
You might not want to deal with the downtime that comes with running updates for your PC or phone, but they often come with a security suite that keeps your information safe from hackers. You can close loopholes by consistently updating your system software.
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Change Your Passwords Often and Make them Secure
Passwords might seem like an inconvenience, but they are the thing standing between you and data loss, among worse things. Change your passwords, follow good password guidelines, and never store them in a place where others can access them.
The internet is a great tool for moms, but it can also be a vector through which other people can access your information. As such, you need to maintain your security by following the tips we have provided here. That way, you can date online and feel completely secure, knowing that you have insulated the rest of your life from people who are looking to steal your information and use it to harm you or your family. In the future, make sure all your digital endeavors are up to the challenges that come with the ever-changing internet