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We understand that navigating security is important these days, so we’ve gathered a few tips to help you protect yourself while using Windows 10.

It’s important to use encrypted connections or VPN whenever possible. Windows 10 does offer a little help when dealing with Internet Service Providers. In your Wi-Fi settings, turn on the “Use random hardware addresses” feature to make it harder for people to track your location when you connect to different Wi-Fi networks.

Go to Settings > Privacy > Location to turn off the master location switch at the top of the page. Here you can turn location service off for your user account, set a city, zip, or region for apps to deliver relevant content, specify a default location for Windows to use when a more precise location isn’t available, and erase your saved history.

Cortana uploads some of your information from your calendar, contacts, browser history, and more to make your experience more personal. Click here to find out how to turn off Cortana completely.

You can save your files to the cloud using OneDrive when using your Microsoft account, but OneDrive is an opt-in service. Don’t sign in and it won’t do anything. If you accidentally sign in, click here to shut down OneDrive completely.

Call 217-228-6180 if you need us to help you with a more specific Windows 10 question!

You might call it a memory stick, flash drive, thumb drive, jump drive or a number of other names. Chances are you’ve got at least one lying around, but what would you do if you found one on the ground that didn’t belong to you?

Two hundred and ninety-seven flash drives were dropped in plain sight on the U of I campus in Champaign, Urbana last year. Forty-five percent of participants opened one or more files on the picked up flash drives and ultimately ninety-eight percent, or 290 of the drives, were removed from their drop locations by the end of the observation period. (Read the paper.)

That open rate is way too high. Our point is that you don’t know where that flash drive has been, so you should probably throw it away. If it has contact information physically on the outside of the drive, you could try to find the owner, but ultimately you shouldn’t just plug it in and see what’s on it.

Even if a flash drive isn’t hiding malware that could compromise your computer, at the very least, sharing drives could have exposed it to such atrocities. Unfortunately, the overall majority of USB vendors don’t build any kind of security into the devices, so you have to look out for yourself.

Call 217-228-6180 if you have a mystery flash drive we can help you with.