Identity theft is on the rise in America, and users of social media and smartphones are more vulnerable than ever. You might think you’re safe online, but here are a few mistakes that might be making you vulnerable to identity theft.
Putting your whole birthday on your Facebook profile: It’s fun to have dozens of people wish you a happy birthday once a year, but your birthday is a great starting point for anybody trying to steal your identity.
Taking a lot of online quizzes: What Gossip Girl character are you? What kind of guys like you? What wild animal are you? No matter how badly you want to know the answers to these questions, going to find out might be more dangerous than you think. As you give away personal information in those quizzes, identity thieves are able to assemble the sort of information that could allow them to answer security questions.
Not putting a screen lock on your phone: It’s a pain to have to plug in a couple of numbers or swipe a pattern every time you want to use your phone, but it’s your first and most important line o f defense against having your information harvested in case you lose your phone. As several hackers were able to prove, not locking your phone with Google Wallet on it can prove disastrous for your finances.
Tweeting your vacation plans: Especially if you also have your physical address floating around the internet, this is as good as posting a giant sign on your Twitter feed or Facebook wall that says: come rob me!
Not Disabling Geotagging: Once again, Foursquare and geotagging your Twitter and Facebook accounts might seem like harmless fun, but providing criminals with constant updates on your physical location is a recipe for disaster. It might seem like it only goes out to your friends, but as that list of followers swells it can be hard to keep track of whether or not everyone following you really knows you.
Not Changing the Password on Your Email: Even if you use different passwords for everything you do, which most people don’t, there’s really only one password people need to find out everything about you: your email. Every time you change your password somewhere else, that’s where the confirmation is going to end up. So if a breach occurs somewhere else and you change that password, anybody sitting on your email can have easy access to finding the new one.
A lot of these things are very simple and logical, so why don’t more people do them? For Adam Levin, chairman of identity management and data risk management services provider Identity Theft 911, it’s because despite warnings people still feel invincible online, and the tradeoff in convenince that some of these measures would take seems like too steep a price to pay.
“People, if given a choice, tend to choose convenience over security,” he says. “If a website takes a little longer to load because it’s more secure, people will use a different one because they don’t want to stick around.”
The good news is that being just a little bit more careful can make you much safer: with so many easy targets out there, it doesn’t pay to go after the harder ones.
Author: Chief Editor
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