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.)
The world says, So do I.