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.) 25