Time for your dig­ital spring clean

With astro­nom­ical spring starting this week-end, this seems the ideal time for a spring clean. Below we will explain how you can do the same in your dig­ital world, and why this will also ben­efit your security!

Apps and programs

Removing apps and pro­grams from your smart­phone or com­puter doesn’t just leave you with more memory and room in your pro­gram overview, it will also speed up your device, reduce power con­sump­tion and the number of poten­tial vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in your system.

If you want to be thor­ough, you might con­sider a com­plete rein­stal­la­tion of your oper­ating system on your com­puter, or reset­ting your smart­phone to fac­tory set­tings.  First though, you have to make sure to back up your data!

Accounts

It used to be rather involved or even impos­sible to delete your accounts from most online plat­forms. Since the GDPR came into effect though, an increasing number of organ­i­sa­tions offer an option to delete your own account in your pro­file set­tings. From a data pro­tec­tion and secu­rity per­spec­tive, it is highly rec­om­mended deleting any unused accounts this way. This mea­sure is an effec­tive means of pre­venting any poten­tial future data leaks.

Con­tacts

Deleting inac­tive con­tacts from your address­book doesn’t just make it easier to find any actu­ally rel­e­vant ones, but also reduces the risk of sending a mes­sage to the wrong person by mistake.

Files

Take the easy option and look for files which are dupli­cates or have sev­eral ver­sions to start with. Before deleting them, please note how­ever that dupli­cated images, songs or movies could be of dif­ferent levels of quality.

Rarely used files which you would prefer not to get rid of for sen­ti­mental rea­sons can also be archived on an external data car­rier. This has the advan­tage that not all of your per­sonal data end up in the wrong hands in case your data are stolen. And don’t forget to create a back-up of your archive, too.

Folder struc­ture

If you haven’t already done so, we rec­om­mend cre­ating a folder struc­ture which will allow you to find your files faster. To do so, con­sider the filing loca­tion where you would start to look for a cer­tain file later.

Cleaning and tuning tools

We don’t rec­om­mend using any tuning and cleanig tools. Your system’s sta­bility is often affected once you have used them. In case you would like to rid your system of any unnec­es­sary bal­last, a com­plete rein­stal­la­tion of your oper­ating system is still the most reli­able method.