We’ll be honest.
Today’s Advent tip is a harder sell than most of the others we’ve done so far.
We’re suggesting that you don’t stay logged in to your favourite online services all the time.
We know how convenient it is to login to Facebook in the morning, or at the beginning of the week, and to tick the “Keep me logged in” box.
Other sites use other words, such as “Remember me,” but the idea is the same: you login once and then you don’t have to keep logging back in all the time.
It’s even more convenient to stay logged in via mobile apps, because typing a suitably long and secure password is harder and more error prone on a phone than it is on a regular keyboard.
Indeed, many mobile apps quietly and automatically remember your password even between reboots so the app can log you back in automatically every time you restart it.
The thing is, all this logged-in-forever convenience comes at the cost of reduced security.
Social media sites love what they call frictionlessness, which is a fancy way of saying, “We want your clicks to count, every time you click, with no need for a second thought, and with no pesky pop-up login window.”
But sometimes – quite frequently, to be honest – a second thought is exactly what you want.
Images of Christmas tree and Advent calendar courtesy of Shutterstock.