How do you keep your personal and financial information safe online?

It depends on where you keep your information online.

If it’s on your own website, then you can implement as many security features as your budget permits to keep your information as safe as you desire.

If it’s on somebody else’s website – e.g. Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon – the website owner owns your data. TBH, it can do whatever it wants with it. Many websites say that your data is encrypted and that even they can’t read it. Having worked for my entire career in the IT indusry, I take such promises with the proverbial barrel of salt. Since the website owner can cancel your account anytime, you can lose access to your information in the blink of an eye.

There’s a famous story of this guy who uploaded a video to YouTube. Apparently, the background song had some lyrics that violated the YouTube TOS. He was banned from YouTube and had his entire Google Account disabled. As a result, he lost access to his own files, emails and the other personal and financial information he had stored in Google Drive, GMail, etc. I won’t be surprised if this story is true.