It might be details of a surprise birthday party for a friend, your bank details or accounts, job applications, a child’s adoption details or a slushy love letter, but everyone has something to hide.

Identity theft might be in the headlines, but there are all kinds of reasons for hiding all kinds of data from prying eyes.

Be safe, be informed
Simple privacy is incredibly important. If you bring work home from the office, there could be documents on your computer that have personal information about other people – whether it’s school marking, staff appraisals or correspondence with a customer. Simple good practice should dictate that no one else sees such information.

And then there are things that might just spoil surprises – details of the arrangements for a romantic weekend away you need to hide from your partner, for example. It’s not just about keeping bank records safe from criminals.

Some people love to say that the innocent have nothing to hide, but it’s not really true; most of us have some things that we’d rather not share with people, for a huge variety of reasons.

In making sure you keep all this information secure, the trick is to decide how private things need to be, and how much effort is needed to keep them that way.

Remember, too, that there are different types of security; some put up a real barrier to all but the most determined – like the gates at the end of Downing Street – while others are little more than a deterrent, and might frighten away the casual snooper, or persuade them to try a different method of attack – a bit like the checkpoints on roads around London.

On a PC, the same holds true; there are different ways of keeping information secure, depending on whether it’s to stop someone browsing through your hard disk, or attacks by virus writers or scammers trying to obtain sensitive financial information.

Safety first
There’s one other thing, too: keeping information safe on a PC is a sensible precaution, but it’s not the final step. Why encrypt a hard drive, for example, if private letters are going to be put out with the recycling, or credit cards blithely handed over for staff in shops and restaurants to carry into the back room, instead of presenting the Chip and Pin terminal to you at your table or at the counter?

We’ll show you how to protect a PC – but don’t forget the other stuff; after all, shredders are pretty cheap these days.

And before we talk about the ways in which individual documents or folders on a computer can be protected from prying eyes, there’s something else to remember – basic virus and spyware protection is essential.