If you’re traveling the holidays this year, we have eight tech tips to help you stay safe while using your devices on the go.
We’ve offered holiday themed tech advice before (here are a couple of our past articles on the top 10 Holiday Shopping Tips for Safer Online Shopping & 5 Holiday Tips for Your E-Commerce Business and 5 for Everyone Else). The holidays usually mean more time off which can lead to more time spent browsing the web or being able to work on things in your business you usually don’t have time for.
It’s also a good idea to keep in mind that bad actors don’t typically take the holidays off, in fact ransomware attacks usually increase by 30% on the holidays. That’s because many people are keeping an eye out for sale emails or emails from relatives this time of year – giving more opportunities for scammers and bad actors to take advantage of folks just looking for a good deal or a message from their loved ones.
Traveling especially can leave you more vulnerable, if you’re quickly scanning messages in-between flight connections, logging into public WiFi or any number of things that are a normal part of being on the go you can miss some obvious red flags.
That’s why we’re going to divide up our advice into 4 tips that are related to being safer online while traveling, and 4 tips for improving your technology experience while traveling.
First our safety themed tips:
- As we mentioned, be careful on public WiFi. Nowadays, even if you need to use your laptop the better option might be to use your phone as a hotspot. If you do need to connect to public Wi-Fi, consider doing it through a VPN. We can personally recommend Mullvad which is not subscription based, one payment will get you online through a secure connection without having to remember to cancel it later.
- Be careful about what you’re posting on social media. Posting travel photos for your friends and family to see can be really fun, but you should be wary about who else might be watching. It’s a good idea to make your social media profiles private but if you maintain a public presence, you can also think about posting those photos after your trip has concluded instead.
- Public charging stations can also pose a risk. Unfortunately, these stations can be tampered with and become an attack vector to everyone who uses them. Battery banks are pretty inexpensive these days and even more convenient when you’re on the go.
- Don’t leave your items unattended. Just as airport personnel will ask if your suitcases have been in your possession the whole time, it’s a good idea to keep track of your belongings from a tech standpoint as well. Someone with bad intent might not be after your device when your data is much more valuable.
Now for our convenience themed tips:
- Keep track of your belongings on the go with an Apple Airtag, Tile Pro or other bluetooth based trackers. A misplaced bag can ruin your vacation, having one of these trackers inside it will prevent that from happening.
- Turn any audio jack into a Bluetooth wireless transmitter. Whether you rent a car without a Bluetooth adapter or you want to use your Bluetooth headphones on the plane, a wireless Bluetooth transmitter is a gamechanger. Best of all many options are on sale at the moment for Black Friday, we’ve personally used the Anker Soundsync. It’s small so it won’t take up much room in your bag and as 12 hours of run time per charge.
- We mentioned using your phone as a mobile hotspot up above, but if your data plan is not the best you can also purchase a standalone mobile hotspot (with a data package included). This can also be a gamechanger if your network Isn’t going to be stellar where you’re going, you can purchase a mobile data plan for a network that has coverage instead. T-Mobile, AT&T and more all have options for this.
- Having to work on the go but don’t want to drag your whole setup with you? Consider a portable monitor. If you’ve gone to two (or more) monitors at work you know there’s no going back, but sometimes travel includes doing some work out on the road and bringing your at home setup is not going to be an option. Portable monitors often come with a travel ready case and can be connected to your laptop via USB-C (both for power and display), bringing you the convenience or two displays without the headache of trying to travel with a full-size monitor.
Technical advice like this is one of the advantages of being a Valley Techlogic customer, and for a limited time if you meet with us about our services, we will give you $100 cash just to hear us out.
What do you have to lose? Schedule a consultation today.
Looking for more to read? We suggest these other articles from our site.
This article was powered by Valley Techlogic, an IT service provider in Atwater, CA. You can find more information at https://www.valleytechlogic.com/ or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/valleytechlogic/ . Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/valleytechlogic.
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