On the QT | The Official Newsletter of GWA August-September 2016 | Page 25
PUBLISHING
Magazine (Circulation less than 100K)
Garden Making, Issue No. 24: Garden Essentials,
Inspiring Media Inc.: Beckie Fox and Michael Fox
Newspaper Garden Feature Page or Section
Thistle & Fig Tales, “History of Fertilizer”, Pith &
Vigor: Alice Marcus Krieg and Carmen DeVito
Book (General Readership)
Epic Tomatoes: Storey Publishing
Blue Ribbon Vegetable Gardening:
Storey Publishing
Book (Technical/Reference)
The Seed Garden: The Art and Practice of Seed
Saving: Seed Savers Exchange
Newsletter/Bulletin/Brochure
“Growing Together,” Fall 2015 Issue: The Davey
Tree Expert Company
Calendar
2015 National Big Tree Program Calendar: The
Davey Tree Expert Company
E-Zine Overall
Dallying in the Dirt: Kenneth Brown
E-Book Overall
Think Like A Gardener: Saxon Holt & PhotoBotanic.com
E-Newsletter Overall
Buffalo-NiagaraGardening.com: Connie Stofko
TRADE
Newsletter, Bulletin, or Brochure
“Coreopsis for the Mid-Atlantic Region”:
Mt. Cuba Center
Catalog
Sakata Home Grown Vegetable Catalog: Sakata
Seed America, Inc.
Press Release, Press Kit, or Promo
“Perfect Blooms that Beg to Be Brought
Indoors”: Ferguson Caras LLC for David Austin
Roses
Magazine
Bloom, December 2015, Look Book Edition:
Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden
Special Projects
2016 Winter Coloring Book: Botanical Interests
HOW TO PROTECT YOUR
ONLINE PRIVACY
B Y R A N D Y S C H U LT Z
As professional communicators in the 21st
century, we all spend
an increasing amount
of time online. We post
on Facebook, we send
and receive emails,
we check Facebook
again, we send another
few emails, we use Google to do some quick
research, we read more emails, and then we
check Facebook again. And all of this happens
before we’ve finished our first cup of morning
coffee.
But even as we spend more time online,
a recent survey by the U.S. Department of
Commerce suggests that a growing number
of us are expressing concerns about our online
privacy. Too much personal information is being
collected, identity theft is on the rise and too
many ads bombard us as we navigate through
our online lives.
EROSION OF ONLINE PRIVACY
Most people don’t realize that their free email
account is one of the weak links in their online
privacy. It turns out that free email accounts
aren’t really free – you “pay” for your email with
your privacy. If you use Gmail, Google scans
every email looking for keywords that will help
them send you ads for things it thinks you
might buy. Some of the private info gleaned
from your emails is sold to third parties.
It’s all perfectly legal. You gave companies
like Google and Yahoo permission to read your
emails the moment you hit the “Agree” button
when you opened your account. And that’s just
one example of how our online privacy is being
eroded.
KEEPING IT PRIVATE
Follow these tips to help keep your online life
more private:
• Most people who get hacked online are
careless with their account passwords. Avoid
using “123456,” “password” or other easyto-guess passwords. Include capital letters,
•
•
•
•
numbers and symbols (#, $, % and others) to
make your passwords tougher to crack.
The emails you send and receive using a free
email account are scanned to learn details
about your interests and preferences. To
protect your personal info and reduce your
exposure to online advertising, use a secure
email service.
Be careful what personal information you share
on Facebook and other social media sites.
Facebook collects your information and shares it
with advertisers and other companies.
Delete tracking cookies—those small pieces
of code that websites use to store information about your online activities. Search
“delete tracking cookies” for easy-to-follow
instructions.
Using public Wi-Fi (at coffee shops, hotels
and other public places) makes you more
vulnerable to hacks and cybercriminals
stealing your private information such as
passwords and bank accounts. It’s better to
conduct financial business at home.
One way to protect online privacy is to spend
a few dollars a month on a private and secure
email account such as Hushmail.com, Reagan.
com or SafeCloudNow.com. They provide
automatic email encryption that makes it extremely difficult for hackers to gain entry to the
contents of your emails.
Randy Schultz, chairperson of the GWA Membership
Committee, is co-founder of Safe Cloud Now, which
provides easy-to-use private email accounts. For a
free one-year secure email account, visit
SafeCloudNow.com and enter the coupon code
GWA2016. To make it easy to try a private email
account, SafeCloudNow.com is offering a free secure
email account for one year to the first 10 GWA
members who register at the site. (A Safe Cloud Now
email account is regularly $4.99 per month.)
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