Ok. I’m going to do everyone a public service.

Given the email address of anyone moderately active online and it is usually possible to have their address, phone number, and pictures of their house within thirty minutes. When you put information online, be it pictures, names, addresses, connections with friends, check-ins, or anything else that might constitute real personal information. Try it. Take your email addresses, usernames, and real names, and search them in sequence. See what pops up. When you post something online it is usually out of your hands and cannot be taken back. Even if you’ve deleted your facebook page, or cleared out your myspace or whatever social networking or personal information repository you use, internet archives are very handy at storing your public personal information for a very long time.

Don’t post information about yourself online counting on people to self govern and hope that the pervs stay away. They don’t always stay away. When you post a picture online and make it public you are giving a practiced data miner, chain searcher, social engineer, etc exactly what they want: another piece of information with which to build a complete picture of your life. Whats the security question on your email account? Is it the name of your school or parent or best friend? Do you have that information out somewhere else online? Well then your email account is vulnerable. Do you have pictures of yourself publicly accessible that show you around or in your house? Your house is now findable. Do you geotag your photos? Well then your coordinates at the time the picture was taken are embedded in the image and can be viewed by anyone with a program designed to view image meta information.

If your friends list is public and your twitter is public then between the two it might very well be possible to glean your current location by simply connecting the dots from that tweet about you going over to cindy’s with the information gotten from cindy’s facebook page that provides a chain search path to her home address. Am I being clear? Keep your shit PRIVATE online. If youre gonna use facebook lock EVERYTHING to everyone that isn’t on your friends list. If youre gonna use twitter make sure its private. Make all image hosting accounts private. Keep your real name off the internet. And for gods sake…change your passwords to something secure and make sure your security questions aren’t answerable by personal information…theres always someone who will know that answer.