Your 2020 checklist: 6 steps to a safer digital life

By Jefferson Graham | USA Today

With New Year’s around the corner and another few days off work, we here at USA TODAY have some tips on how to take hold of your digital life before 2020 kicks off.

We’ve got six things for you to do over the holiday.

Change your passwords to keep hackers away.
Go through your subscriptions to weed out the ones you’re not using.
Scan your analog photos and organize your digital collection.
Clear out your smartphone apps.
Back up your data
Pull out the smartphone and interview your parents, kids or other loved ones, for posterity.

Passwords and managers

You’ve heard us say it a zillion times. Hackers just need one password to break in and steal your digital data. So if you use the same password over and over again, you’re asking for trouble.

You need one unique password for every website you go to, and it needs to contain a combination of lowercase and uppercase letters as well as numbers and symbols. Some experts have recommended really long words, like ilovelemsointhespringtimehowaboutyou as a variant, but just try typing that one over and over all day, and see how you like that?