Online Privacy

Keeping your identity and personal information private is becoming harder to do especially if you belong to online social communities and such. There is an online directory, Spokeo where people can search for other people using a phone number, name, or email address.

I search for myself by my name first. When I did this it had listed the information I had listed under my profile/info on Facebook. It also graphed my credit score, our income, the average income of the people in my neighborhood, the average house value for my neighborhood, and so much more.

I searched via my email address and I saw pictures of my kids that were uploaded to Picasa and my blog. It even showed items I had purchased and items that were on wish lists for Target. If I had a paid membership of $2.95 a month I'd have access to the full report which would show all of the sites my email address was registered with.

The search via my phone number pulled up my address and the info on my neighborhood.

I don't know about you but I don't want just anyone to have access to this info. If you are like me then you need to remove yourself from this listing. Do this by searching for your name then copying the search result URL for yourself. Click on the privacy link at the bottom of the page and then follow the instructions of pasting the URL and so on. You need to do this for each way people can search for you: name, email, and phone number.

Go to http://www.spokeo.com/ to search and remove yourself from this listing.

How to Avoid Junk -Email

I received an email with the following and thought it was excellent advice and rather than forward it on to people I'm sharing it here.

A friend who is a computer expert received the following directly from a system administrator for a corporate system. It is an excellent message that ABSOLUTELY applies to ALL of us who send emails. Please read the letter below, even if you're sure you already follow proper procedures. Do you really know how to forward emails? 50% of us do; 50% DO NOT. (I think more like 20%--80%). Do you wonder why you get viruses or junk mail? Do you hate it? Every time you forward an email, there is information left over from the people who got the message before you, namely their email addresses and names.. As the messages get forwarded along, the list of addresses builds, and builds, and builds, and all it takes is for some poor sap to get a virus, and his or her computer can send that virus to every email address that has come across his computer. Or, someone can take all of those addresses and sell them or send junk mail to them in the hopes that you will go to the site and he will make five cents for each hit. That's right, all of that inconvenience over a nickel. How do you stop it? Well, there are several easy steps. Try the following if you haven't done it before:

(1) When you forward an email, DELETE all of the other addresses that appear in the body of the message (at the top). That's right, DELETE them. Highlight them and delete them, backspace them, cut them, whatever it is you know how to do. It only takes a second. You MUST click the 'Forward' button first and then you will have full editing capabilities against the body and headers of the message. If you don't click on 'Forward' first, you won't be able to edit the message at all.

(2) Whenever you send an email to more than one person, DO NOT use the To: or Cc:fields for adding email addresses. Always use the BCC: (blind carbon copy) field for listing the email addresses. This way the people you send to will only see their own email address. If you don't see your BCC option, click on where it says To: and your address list will appear. Highlight the address and choose BCC: and that's it, it's that easy. When you send to BCC: your message will automatically say 'Undisclosed Recipients' or the principal addressee in the 'TO:' field of the people who receive it.

(3) Remove any 'FW:' in the subject line. You can re-name the subject if you wish or even fix spelling.

(4) ALWAYS hit your Forward button from the actual email you are reading. Ever get those emails that you have to open 10 pages to read the one page with the information on it? By forwarding from the actual page you wish someone to view, you stop them from having to open many e-mails just to see what you sent.

(5) Have you ever gotten an email that is a petition? It states a position and asks you to add your name and address and to forward it to 10 or 15 people or your entire address book. The email can be forwarded on and on and can collect thousands of names and email addresses.

A FACT: The completed petition is actually worth a couple of bucks to a professional spammer because of the wealth of valid names and email addresses contained therein. DO NOT put your email address on any petition. If you want to support the petition, send it as your own personal letter to the intended recipient. Your position will carry more weight as a personal letter than a laundry list of names and email address on a petition. (And don't believe the ones that say that the email is being traced, it just isn't so!) Some of the other emails to DELETE and NOT forward are:

1. The one that says something like, 'Send this email to 10 people and you will see something great run across your screen.' Or sometimes they'll just tease you by saying 'something really cute will happen. 'IT ISN'T GONNA HAPPEN!!!!! (We are still seeing some of the same emails that we waited on 10 years ago!)

2 Don't let the bad luck ones scare you either; delete them, they are trash.

3. Before you forward an 'Amber Alert', or a 'Virus Alert', or some of the other emails floating around nowadays, check them out. Most of them are junk mail that's been circling the net for YEARS! Just about everything you receive in an email that is in question can be checked out at Snopes. Just go to www.truthorfiction.com . It's really easy to find out if it's real or not. If it's not, please don't pass it on..

4. Before sending the email scroll down to the bottom and remove ALL the build up of 'Virus Protection Messages' and other advertising that get tacked on each time an email gets forwarded. So please, in the future, let's stop the junk mail and the viruses.