Internet security?

[The Raven]

We are part of internet and as such, we have (most of us) plenty of social networks accounts. However, how safe is it to post photos, personal data such as date of brith, school, city where we live, country, relationship status, description of ourselves and keeping profiles public? Hackers are nasty people and they are like predators who gather your info and can even use it for identity theft. With enough info, why not? If I would to know all data about somebody, I can sign him up for something, order something, or even use his credit card.

What do you do to protect yourself on internet?

 

[Mendalla]

We are part of internet and as such, we have (most of us) plenty of social networks accounts. However, how safe is it to post photos, personal data such as date of brith, school, city where we live, country, relationship status, description of ourselves and keeping profiles public? Hackers are nasty people and they are like predators who gather your info and can even use it for identity theft. With enough info, why not? If I would to know all data about somebody, I can sign him up for something, order something, or even use his credit card.

What do you do to protect yourself on internet?

As you suggest, I minimize what I share, don't use my real name (save on LinkedIn but I don't really use it much), use a fake birthdate and similar details (keep the year, but change month and day), don't post identifiable photos (again, save on LinkedIn), use privacy controls where offered. I could probably be more private but those are some of my usual.

And it is not just hackers that are an issue. I left Meta's properties due to concern about their rather cavalier attitude to privacy. They basically see our personal information as a commodity they can sell to advertisers and researchers, whose level of security we have no idea about. And there's other sites with similar issues.

 

[Mike30]

The only way is not to be on internet at all.
These days you can investigate anybody that is connected to the system. period.
You may not post your name or other info here and there, but there is always a trace where ever you go. Dots can be connected and you don't
need to be a hacker for that.

 

[Mendalla]

The only way is not to be on internet at all.
These days you can investigate anybody that is connected to the system. period.
You may not post your name or other info here and there, but there is always a trace where ever you go. Dots can be connected and you don't
need to be a hacker for that.

That certainly happens and I agree that there's not much you can do about it short of unplugging completely. The biggest risk, though, isn't people stalking you specifically. It happens, but not as commonly as data getting scraped or stolen from a site in bulk (or happily shared by the site owner in the case of Meta and its advertisers). Minimizing the amount of data you have on that site does minimize your risk because in that case, they aren't targeting specific people, just data they can use to attempt various scams (using stolen personal info to sign up for a credit card and such). So if you've used a fake birthdate, name, location, etc., they aren't going to be able to really do anything with that data.

IOW, I would not just throw up my hands and go, "Oh well, why bother taking measures since they won't work anyway." They can, in fact, mitigate risk for some common scenarios.

There's other things that probably matter more, like being cautious with email containing links asking you to login or provide data (i.e. avoiding phishing attacks), but if a site gets hacked, it's better the attacker gets garbage data than your personal info.

And minimizing personal info online also helps avoid the casual stuff. We used to have a troll threaten members of the site that preceded mine who had real info on the site. They were ministers in the church sponsoring the site so were quite open about who they were and what church they were at. The threats weren't serious, just to contact their presbytery to complain about how apostate they were but still were him taking his conflicts with them into their real lives. He had 0 technical skills which became obvious when we tried to block him (e.g. he never tried using a VPN or proxy to hide his location) so no hacking was involved, he was just using data that was up there on the site and a bit of googling.

 

[Mike30]

@Mendalla I have a setup that I use a different email for each website. And is only used once. That helps a lot with fishing emails and spam/scammers altogether.

 

[Mendalla]

@Mendalla I have a setup that I use a different email for each website. And is only used once. That helps a lot with fishing emails and spam/scammers altogether.

I haven't gone that far but I do keep my old Hotmail as a "garbage" address for signups that I think might generate problems. Keeps crap out of my main personal address.