3foldComm

At 3fold, we are strong advocates for protecting our clients and their personal information. A recent article in the June 2010 Consumer Reports Magazine demonstrates how essential it is that you protect yourself online.

The magazine reports a majority of people post risky information on their social-network profiles. According to the article, fifty-two percent of American adults have posted personal information, like their full birth date (38 percent), photos of children (21 percent), their children’s names (13 percent), street address (8 percent) and mention details about being away from home  (3 percent).

Some basics to minimize online identity theft include avoiding weak passwords, setting privacy controls on Facebook and other sites to restrict access, removing children’s names from photo captions, and never posting a full birth date.

The magazine suggests:

• Password: Simple is not better. If it’s in the dictionary, ditch it as a password, even if you stick numbers on the end. Mix upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols. Use at least eight characters.
• Birth dates in profiles: The more information someone can find about you, the easier it is to access to your bank or credit card account. If you’ve already entered a birth date, go to your profile page and click on the Info tab, then on Edit Information. Under the Basic Information section, choose to show only the month and day or no birthday at all.
• Privacy controls: For almost everything in your Facebook profile, you can limit access to only your friends, friends of friends, or yourself. Restrict access to photos, birth date, religious views, and family information, among other things. You can give only certain people or groups access to items such as photos, or block particular people from seeing them. Consider leaving out contact info, such as phone number and address, since you probably don’t want anyone to have access to that information anyway.
• Posting your child’s name: Don’t use a child’s name in photo tags or captions. If someone else does, delete it by clicking on Remove Tag. If your child isn’t on Facebook and someone includes his or her name in a caption, ask that person to remove the name.
• Never mention that you’ll be away from home: If you want to talk about your trip, wait until you get home.
• Search engines: To help prevent strangers from accessing your page, go to the Search section of Facebook’s privacy controls and select Only Friends for Facebook search results. Be sure the box for public search results isn’t checked.
• Kids unsupervised on Facebook: If you have a child or teenager on Facebook, become one of their online friends and use your e-mail address as the contact for their account so that you receive their notifications and monitor their activities.