Encryption: How to put walls around what's on your phone and computer

FILED - If you want private things to remain private, confidential things to remain confidential and valuable things to stay safe, then you should be paying attention to whether or not your data is encrypted. It often is as standard, and yet many security holes remain. Photo: Andrea Warnecke/dpa

BERLIN: It can be a disaster if your private data gets into the wrong hands. But how to protect it? The most important component in data security is encryption.

"Encryption is used to protect individual files or the entire hard drive or memory of smartphones and tablets from unauthorised access," explains Simran Mann, a security expert with Germany’s IT industry association Bitkom.