Social networking and identity fraud
I have recently been exploring the world of social networking through Facebook, one of the larger social networking sites on the Internet.
Apart from finding out that I know a lot more people than I originally envisaged, it was rather interesting to see how much information people reveal themselves on social networking sites. Often you will find a person’s full name, birthday (including year), home town, e-mail and phone numbers.
That’s almost enough information to enable a malicious person to commit identity fraud.
One could argue that one could (and should) restrict access to this information to the person’s friends. But I wonder whether people actually check the visibility of their profiles, or consider this risk when deciding whether to accept a third party as a friend.
Food for thought. (Yes, I work in risk management.)
I guess different people have different levels of paranoia when it comes to online identities.
For me, I’m fairly paranoid. I don’t divulge personal details other than what is fairly obvious or is common knowledge. The only thing I’m willing to offer is my email address, and this is only to people that I personally know.
I, as a rule, only add people who I know in real life.