3 out of 4 Australians have visited a social networking site like Face Book, My Space & Twitter. In fact over 5 million people in Australia are regular Face Book users.
With all this social interaction over the internet you can quickly become easy prey for criminals.
Identity theft is a crime that involves stealing money or gaining benefit from pretending to be someone else. Only a few bits of discreet information are needed for these high tech fraudsters to build an identity and embark on a crime spree.
So how can you ensure that you protect yourself and your identity on these social networking sites?
Lindy Asimus from Design Business Engineering has a few tips to help protect your personal information in cyber space.
1. Don't include middle names in your profile page.
2. If you want to provide an address use a postal address or just enter the city you live in and leave the rest blank.
3. Only ever provide a business phone number or better still an email address.
4. Do not display your date of birth in full, just put the day and month there is absolutely no need to show the year, if the site won't allow you to delete the year just pick one like 1919 and make a note of it in your diary (you may need it to prove you are the administrator).
5. Be careful about the public access information you put on your sites. You don't want thieves knowing that you just bought some expensive home theatre system and that you are about to go away for a month.
Remember, without being paranoid your personal details are yours and being aware of security online is good practice. It is also a good idea to monitor your kids sites regularly as they often don't see the dangers of internet activity.
Click here for more information on social networking profile tips from Lindy Asimus.
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