Keep Your Podcast Safe and Secure
Data Privacy Day is quickly approaching, this Saturday, January 28th! According to the iapp, Data Privacy Day is “an international effort to create awareness about the importance of respecting privacy, safeguarding data, and enabling trust.” While there is one day dedicated to Data safety and security it really is something that needs to be practiced daily in order to stay safe and secure! Especially when you are putting in a great deal of time and effort to create content for your podcast.
Maybe you don't know where to start! When creating content for your show you are creating loads of Data that, if not protected properly, can be used by others and/or get deleted. This is why we want to take advantage of Data Privacy Day and discuss ways to keep your Podcast's data safe and secure.
Privacy Measures
There are a lot of things that are important in order to keep you Podcast data safe and secure. Most of which start with privacy! Such as keeping your personal information secure. As most know, don’t share passwords, account numbers, or any information specific to you or your account. Some things we suggest doing to help keep your data safe and secure are:
Make an email just for your podcast: this allows you to keep your personal and ‘work’ information separate. Avoiding a complete leak if one gets compromised.
Create secure passwords: No easy information (birthdays, kids names, spouses, etc), Capitalization, numbers, and unique characters (!@#)
Use Two-factor authentication (2FA): This requires an additional code, given by a secure site, when logging in to new devices.
Use LastPass: LastPass allows you to securely record and share information such as usernames and passwords. This is really important if you having to share your information with others – you will be able to do so with out them seeing your information – keeping it safe and secure
Make sure you are the owner of RSS feed, Domain and your hosting: This means the data is yours and no one can use it without your permission
Get Antivirus Software: We know, no one wants to pay for this but it is 100% worth it if you want to avoid your computer/devices getting hacked and all of your data getting deleted. Thousands of hours of content – GONE!
All, if not most, of these points are easy to achieve and can make the difference of potentially losing your podcast due to your content being deleted or personal information leaked. Make sure your data is safe and secure and protected from getting lost, or worse – used against you!
Secure Your Work
Great, you’re all set to keep your information private. But that is not all you need to do to make sure your data is safe and secure! In school, did you ever work on an essay and forget to plug your computer to its battery, the computer died and you frantically plugged it in and prayed that your essay was still in tact? If this didn’t happen to you, you may be one of the lucky ones but it’s very common!
Shit happens, computers die mid-editing session, websites crash, etc. In order to make sure, when these things happen, you don’t lose all of your work we suggest you:
Backup your content (Your podcast, your website, planned content (if you script anything, pull images ahead of time, etc.): Just like that essay, save your work!
Make sure you keep all your podcast episodes + audio/video files (somewhere else too): this can be to an external drive, google drive, or ‘the cloud’, etc.
If you have guests, protect them as well (especially if you are doing anonymous things): ‘The Podcast Host’ has a great article on this here.
Now you have safeguards in place to keep your data safe and secure. Remember, backing up data is not a one time thing! We suggest doing this monthly if not weekly – at the very least make sure to do it once a year.
Conclusion
With the importance of keeping your data safe and secure in mind, use Data Privacy Day as an excuse to check that all of your information is private and all of your data is backed up! If you need to change passwords, download LastPass and keep them documented there when you change them. If you’ve yet to back up your work, get started on that!
It’s never too late to make sure your information is safe and secure! If you need help, don’t forget to reach out to us here!
Hav
This blog post was updated November 28th, 2023
