A colleague plugs a personal USB drive into the office computer to transfer vacation photos. The next day, the IT department detects malware on the internal network. This kind of scenario occurs regularly and illustrates how digital stakes are played out in everyday actions, not in abstract concepts.
Online security, privacy protection, and good digital practices are not a discipline reserved for specialists. They are operational reflexes that every user, employee, or individual can integrate without heavy training.
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Metadata and encrypted messaging: what encryption does not cover
There is a lot of talk about end-to-end encrypted messaging. Its adoption is significantly increasing among 18-25 year-olds in France, according to a study by ANSSI published in March 2026. The content of messages becomes unreadable to a third party. Up to this point, the reasoning holds.
The problem is that encryption does not protect metadata. Who communicates with whom, at what time, from which location, how often: this information remains accessible to operators, platforms, and sometimes advertisers. It is enough to reconstruct a complete social network, movement habits, and even political or union affiliations.
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In practice, one can send an encrypted message to a lawyer or a doctor without anyone reading the content, but the mere fact of the exchange remains visible. For professionals handling sensitive personal data (health, legal, education), this point changes the game. Detailed resources on these privacy and digital security issues can be found at tic-et-net.org, which compiles practical angles often absent from institutional guides.
The ground strategy: limit installed applications, disable default geolocation, and prefer tools that minimize metadata collection (not just those that encrypt content).
Deepfakes and online harassment: a concrete threat to privacy
Non-consensual deepfakes exploded in 2025, particularly in harassment contexts. The report from Meta’s Transparency Center (Q4 2025) points to a concerning trend: reports effectively handled by platforms are decreasing while volumes are increasing.
On the ground, this means that a face published on a social network can be integrated into a manipulated video in a matter of minutes, using freely available tools. The victims are predominantly women and minors.
Reducing exposure without disappearing
The answer is not to leave social networks. It involves precise configuration gestures:
- Restrict the visibility of profile photos to confirmed contacts, not to friends of friends or the public.
- Disable automatic downloading of posted images (an option available on several platforms, often buried in privacy settings).
- Regularly check if one’s face appears in unauthorized content using reverse image search tools.
For companies, the CNIL reminds that the dissemination of deepfakes using an employee’s image can constitute a violation of personal data under GDPR. The employer has an obligation to raise awareness about these risks, just like phishing.
European regulation on AI: what it changes for users in daily life
Since the entry into force of the AI Act in August 2025 (EU regulation 2024/1689), generative AI tools, chatbots, virtual assistants, and text or image generators are subject to new transparency obligations. Penalties for privacy violations in these tools have been strengthened.
In practice, when using a professional chatbot or AI assistant to draft an email, generate a document, or analyze client data, the information entered can feed training models. Entering a social security number, a patient’s name, or a contractual detail into a public AI tool means potentially making them exploitable.
Operational precautions with AI tools
Feedback varies on this point across sectors, but some basic rules apply everywhere:
- Never paste personally identifiable data (names, addresses, case numbers) into a non-internally hosted generative AI tool.
- Check if the tool offers a non-reuse option for entered data for training, and activate it systematically.
- Consider every prompt sent to a chatbot as a potentially public message: only include what one would accept to see displayed.
Ransomware in schools: a often overlooked angle
The ENISA report “Threat Landscape 2025” indicates a significant increase in ransomware attacks targeting educational institutions in Europe. Schools, colleges, universities: these structures combine limited IT budgets, heterogeneous machine fleets, and users poorly trained in digital risks.
A ransomware attack in a high school is not just a technical problem. It means blocked access to report cards, potentially exposed health data of students, and interrupted communications with families. Children and adolescents are both users and collateral victims of these attacks.
Protection comes from simple but rarely applied measures: offline backups, segmentation between educational Wi-Fi and administrative Wi-Fi, two-factor authentication for access to digital workspaces. On this last point, most digital workspaces offer the option, but it remains disabled by default in many institutions.
Good online practices are not a topic for specialists; they are played out in configuring an account, choosing a tool, or how one handles a suspicious attachment. Digital security and privacy are protected through concrete, repeated actions tailored to each user’s context, whether at work, school, or on a personal phone.