Protect Your Identity when using Social Networking Websites

The popularity of social networking on the Internet is increasing every year, and this can be a fun way for you to meet new people and keep in contact with friends and family all over the world.  However because you will in most cases not be able to ‘see’ who you are chatting with, you cannot be sure that the people you meet and interact with are all genuine, so you will need to be on your guard against a number of unscrupulous individuals who prey on social websites and chat rooms, using them for their own sinister agendas.

Know Your Friends

Most social websites offer you privacy functions, where only your authorised friends can access your profile pages and contact you.  It is a good idea to use these security settings to help maintain a level of control over the data you are publishing on your membership pages, and also if you feel someone is harassing you or overstepping your personal boundaries then you can block them from contacting you through the website in the future.  Make sure you don’t give out your personal email, telephone or address details to anyone who you do not know, and just because you have built up a good relationship with them online does not mean you ‘know’ them, as it could literally be anyone pretending to be a fun, nice person when in fact they are just putting on an act.  As you will have probably heard in the media paedophiles and other sinister types frequent chat rooms and social sites pretending to be something that they are not in order to lure other people into becoming friends with them, and many of them can be very convincing, so this is why it is important not to ever post or give out any personal information about yourself online.

Posting Information Online

You must be careful about all the information you publish online, and this includes any personal data you reveal when you are in social websites and chat rooms.  Identity thieves and fraudsters are very clever about accessing the personal information you publish when talking to friends or posting comments, and extracting from this key information that can be used to ‘guess’ your personal log in passwords for online accounts.  For example if you have forgotten your password most websites ask you a ‘memorable’ question to prove who you are so that you can get the password sent to you again.  It is common for people to use maiden names, places of birth, pet names and the place they met their partner as the memorable question, but all of this is the type of data you might mention when chatting online to friends or posting profiles of yourself on social sites, and if you have published it online then anyone will be able to read it and could use it against you.

If you do enjoy social networking then be very careful about the data you post, and use just your nickname or an online alias instead of your real name to make it more difficult for unscrupulous individuals to connect the information you publish to your true identity and use it against you.