You've been hacked! Guarding your personal data

Phones have become personal appendages and hackers lurk in the shadows looking for opportunities to fund illegal ventures on the dark web. (Photo: Shutterstock)

On a recent visit to my mom’s house, she asked why I spent so much time on my phone. Not talking, which is the only use a phone has to her, but doing seemingly everything else. Online banking, changing my auto insurance coverages, ordering food, checking into my flight, ordering the Lyft to take us to dinner. You wouldn’t think 26 years between mom and son would make that much of a difference, but in the world of technology, it does.

Consider this: Many of us do virtually everything online. We live in an app-driven economy. My 80-year-old mother has a phone that plugs into a wall, an address book with phone numbers, a Yellow Pages (I honestly didn’t even think those still existed), and no ATM card out of fear of having her money stolen. Thinking back, it is pretty much how things were 20 or 30 years ago.