Gaming with others online lets you build friendships, blow off steam, and experience the highs of dominating another team or conquering a difficult challenge together. While they’re supposed to be fun and exciting, online games also attract hackers, scammers, and others who want to profit off of your enjoyment and information you may not even realize you’re giving away.
Want to keep privacy risks to a minimum while maxing out your enjoyment? Then heed these seven pro tips!
1. Don’t Give Out Personal Details
There’s no reason to share real-life information with gaming buddies, especially now that doxing and other types of harassment are so widespread. It’s best to keep your characters’ lives separate from your real ones. That means not using names that could help someone identify you and keeping other personal details to a minimum.
People invested in an online gaming community tend to share their interests and even make their favorite games part of their personality. All of this is valuable info data brokers collect to sell to advertisers and email spammers. If your email trash is overflowing and ads know your habits a little too well, it might be time to ask Inclogni data removal or similar services to step in and reduce your digital footprint.
2. Explore & Use Gaming Platform Security Settings
Gaming companies collect a lot of your personal and payment information, so it’s in their best interest to offer comprehensive security. Whenever you install a new platform or gaming client, you should first familiarize yourself with its privacy & security options.
Most offer two-factor authentication, which is crucial for protecting accounts with compromised passwords. You might also be able to enable device and session tracking to identify unauthorized access. If privacy is a major concern, make sure the games you play offer the option of hiding your online presence, profile details, friends list, and similar information.
3. Use Complex and Unique Passwords
The gaming world is no stranger to data breaches, like the one that affected Discord and exposed 750,000 user accounts and associated information. You can’t do much about others’ poor cybersecurity, but you can minimize risks by using unique passwords for all accounts and not sharing the details.
The easiest way to do this is by installing a Windows password manager. Most quality password managers are also compatible with other operating systems like iOS or Linux. But what exactly are they for? They can create and store as many one-of-a-kind, complex passwords as you have accounts and store them in an encrypted vault. Password managers can also provide 2FA if a gaming client doesn’t offer the feature. Furthermore, they let you sync passwords between devices and fill them in automatically without exposing the details.
4. Stick to Legitimate Sources
Gaming can be an expensive hobby, especially if you’re in the habit of buying several AAA titles as soon as they are released. Pirating them or visiting sites that offer cheaper MMO game time is tempting, but it’s also tempting fate.
Downloading games from and signing up to illegitimate sources comes with all kinds of trouble. Downloads may contain malware, while giving out your email could make you the target of phishing scams and spam.
5. Be Careful with Patches
Keeping your games up to date is a no-brainer. You can’t play until you do! Updates rebalance game mechanics, introduce new content, and take care of known cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
That being said, a large patch can break things or even introduce new exploits & instabilities. It’s best to wait a bit for others to bring such problems to the developers’ attention. Hotfixes usually don’t take long, so you won’t miss out on the action.
6. Recognize and React to Suspicious Behavior
Virtual worlds aren’t immune from scammers or people who wish you harm. Behavior like gold selling, cyberbullying, or pretending to be a mod/developer and asking for your credentials is against the terms of service and you should report it. Don’t engage with pushy or aggressive users. Block them instead and continue enjoying your game.
You’ll also want to be wary of phishing scams. Hackers frequently send out emails that look like they come from gaming companies and platforms. They’ll ask for your login details or send you to unsafe sites that may infect your device with malware. Learn how to recognize such emails and stay away from their attachments.
7. Use a VPN
Data like your IP address can tell skilled cyber criminals a lot about you. VPNs route your internet connection through one of their worldwide servers, making it impossible for anyone to track you this way. They let you play with friends from other regions and might even reduce lag if the VPN provider’s servers are closer than the ISP’s to the game server.
This is a sponsored post published on behalf of Inclogni data removal.
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