Not so long ago, losing your mobile phone meant the additional expense of replacing it and possibly, someone charging up additional minutes on your bill.  Today the stakes are higher.  With the ownership of smartphones on the rise, the ability to store more information on your phone can now lead to identity theft opportunities if your mobile phone falls into the wrong hands. 

Here are a few things to keep in mind in efforts to keep your phone and information secure:

REVIEW AND REVISE YOUR CONTACT LIST:  Who you have listed and how you have them listed can increase the potential for identity theft.  Many people don’t know that clearly identifying their spouses with their last names or nicknames like “sweetheart” or “hubby” can lead to identity theft.   A fraudster could text your easily identifiable significant other asking for personal information such as credit card information, bank account PINs, etc.  If you or your loved one is unaware the phone is missing, that personal information could unknowingly be sent into the wrong hands.  To minimize this threat, take the time to scroll through your list of contacts and change last names, nicknames, etc.

LOCK IT: If you have a smartphone, a simple safety step – often overlooked or ignored – is to lock your phone.  Lock it tight by creating a password that is needed to open it.

LOG OUT:  If you use your phone to access online accounts, make sure to log out so that no else could access them.

TRACK IT: There are services that can help you track your cell phone if it goes missing.  Invest in one of these products, such as iHound, which will help you easily lock down and locate your phone, hopefully before someone misuses it.  (Full disclosure, MyID.com and iHound are owned by the same company).

If lost or stolen, replacing a phone is an easy fix; sensitive information on your phone being exposed to the wrong person is not.  Following these simple steps can minimize the chances of your smartphone becoming a conduit for identity theft.

Spring is here and for many that means gearing up for a bit of rest and relaxation with a spring break vacation or, at the very least, planning a fun-filled trip in the summer months to come.  However, the planning shouldn’t stop at selecting your dream destination and accommodations.  Unfortunately, identity thieves are everywhere, and are especially known to target unsuspecting tourists who are loose with their personal information.

Taking the time to protect your identity is a ‘must do’ to ensure your dream get-away doesn’t turn into a nightmare. Here are some tips that can help:

1. Think ahead about the money you’ll need for the trip and carry cash and/or travelers’ checks.  This will prevent you from having to access unfamiliar ATM machines.  If you must use the ATM, use one at a real bank and cover the keypad when inputting your pass code.  Make sure no one is nearby with a cell phone camera and check that the ATM doesn’t have any strange attachments above or below the card slot.
2. Lighten your load and carry only what you really need.  That means only carrying the credit cards, cash and travelers’ checks you will need for the day.  Also think twice about carrying around your passport.  Anything that isn't necessary for the day can be left in the hotel safe.
3. Protect your mobile devices.  With banking online increasingly becoming the norm for many, it’s important to password protect this and other personal information we carry in our smartphones, tablets and laptops, in the event they are stolen or lost.

Fun and adventure should be the focus during your special time away from home, but a bit of forethought implementing these steps can help you steer clear of a world of problems, not only during your vacation, but well beyond it.

Unfortunately, even as careful as you may be about sharing personal information online, you may be unwittingly exposing information through a process called “geotagging.” Today’s smart phones and digital cameras include GPS. When you take video or photo with these devices it embeds the location of where it was taken. So that snap shot of you in front of the Christmas tree might be all it takes for someone that you don’t want to know where you live finding your home. If that picture includes something of value (jewelry, electronics, etc.), a criminal only has to check for the geo tag to find out where to go to try and steal these possessions. They can then watch your postings and activities to find out when you aren’t home and break in.

Although geotagging has taken on this negative role, it’s important to note that it exists on phones and other devices as a very helpful feature. Say you’re trying to find the nearest gas station. A GPS enabled smartphone will instantly find it for you. GPS indicators can also help law enforcement find you should you need them.

So what can be done to make sure smartphone’s geotagging is used for good, not evil? Below are tips to help you steer clear of the dangers posed by this feature:

• The golden rule of online posting - Be mindful about what you post. Assume whatever you put online will be there forever. Therefore, think twice before you post anything.

• Educate yourself, family and friends on geotagging dangers. Make sure you understand what information you are sharing and know what products you own that have and use geotagging capabilities.

• It’s an obvious, but important tip – turn the geotagging feature off if you will be taking photos from your phone that you plan to post online. Instructions on how to turn geotagging off for most phones can be found at www.icanstalku.com, a website created to spread awareness of the privacy issues of geotagging.

• Download disabling software: An easy way to prevent sending out the wrong information is to download this kind of software to your smartphone. To help you prevent sending out the private information, it will search for geotagging and delete it before sending.

Technology is full of little surprises such as geotagging. We take it for granted when using it for helpful purposes, but it can be exploited for dangerous purposes by the wrong people. By keeping informed on the devices you use and the information they may provide you can help to keep what you want private, private…this holiday season and beyond.

Video chat, like Facebook chat, can only be used between confirmed Facebook friends.  For individuals concerned about their privacy, or those with far too many Facebook acquaintances, these privacy tips can help keep video chat limited to people you know and want to speak to face-to-face:

1.  Create Friend Lists for Video Chat. Group trusted friends and family members into a separate friends list from acquaintances, work buddies, or people you don't remember. Friend lists have privacy configuration options, including the ability to allow video chat requests only from certain lists. If you don’t want certain friends video chatting with you, create a friend list that includes the people you want to block from video chat.

1. Click the settings icon in the right corner of the chat list.
2. Select “Edit Availability...”
3. Check the box next to the friend list you’d like to appear unavailable to and click “Close”. You will no longer appear online to these friends.

2.  Temporarily Go Offline. If you want to make yourself temporarily unavailable for Facebook video chat, simply click on the Chat bar at the bottom right of the screen, select Options, then click Go Offline. This will make you unavailable for both instant messages and video conferencing, a must when you only have a few minutes and don't want to be drawn into a long conversation about your favorite television show.

3.  “Ignore” or Remain Offline Permanently. If you find yourself frequently interrupted by chat requests from friends you don’t want to talk to, you can simply ‘Ignore’ the call as suggested by Facebook, or better yet stay offline permanently and do not allow anyone to initiate a chat session with you.

4.  Clean Up Your Friend List. It's a good idea to review your friends list on a regular basis and delete the individuals that you do not know, a process known as ‘unfriending’.  To stop someone from contacting you, you can also block the person from interacting with you in any way on Facebook.

5.  Beware of Video Chat Scams. Beware of Facebook video chat scams from people you don’t know asking you for money or assistance for a cause. Report the abuse to Facebook immediately, and delete the offender from your friends list. If the request is coming from a friend you do know, but it looks suspicious, email or call your friend directly to report the incident, as your friend's Facebook account may have been hacked.

For more information on how to use Facebook video calling, read Video calling: Basics on Facebook.

According to the FTC, Web-based companies frequently engage in “harvesting and trading in information about where we are, what we do, who we meet and what we buy.” Much of this tracking is invisible to consumers. Even though developers that collect information are required to include privacy policies featured on their application or website, many users simply click “I Agree” without reading or understanding the implications of tracking.

The FTC makes the following simple requests from companies regarding privacy:

1.  Build privacy and security protections into new products, limit the amount of information collected to only what is needed, and retain the data only as long as it is needed.

2. Write privacy policies that consumers can understand.

3. Be transparent with consumers about how the company collects data, how they use it, and how long they keep it.

According to privacy advocates, the Internet industry desperately needs a comprehensive and universal step towards greater privacy controls. Until these controls are in place, services like MyID can be a useful stopgap for leaked personal information.

As every entrepreneur, investor, and business executive knows, information has value. Knowing something that your competition does not know is often the crux of a successful business. Many corporations devote an entire division to discovering new trade secrets. Advertisers and marketing professionals have discovered the value of information as well, and they are collecting it at an extraordinary pace.

According to Consumer Reports, every day 45 million Americans allow advertisers to store personally identifying information, an industry term that is defined as any piece of information that can be attached to an identity, such as a name, birth date, social security number, drivers license number, or credit card number, but not things like eye color or favorite brand of toothpaste. All of this information is stored in databases and used to make assumptions about buying behavior. These databases can be shared or sold, used to inform advertiser decisions, or shown to sponsors interested in specific audience demographics. These practices are leading to an advertising industry that trades in information about people.

The primary catalyst behind this new industry is the rapid pace of technological advancement, for instance, the emergence of databases. Prior to modern computing, the work involved in storing and retrieving information on such a scale would have made national databases untenable. One of the earliest uses of these national advertising databases came with the use of shopping mart discount cards. Most shoppers are happy to have their purchasing information collected in order to secure a discount of a few dollars, but this practice has led to a carte blanche for advertisers who want to use individuals' Web browsing history, purchases, and demographic information to better target advertisements.

Whether or not this is an acceptable practice is a point of debate. Advertisers argue that users who visit amateur photography websites would rather see advertisements for a local camera store than advertisements for baby food or car insurance, and, since these databases are protected by privacy policies, companies claim that the information cannot be misused.

Privacy advocates argue that this could not be further from the truth, as evidenced by the growing black market for the information contained in these databases. Over the past ten years, countless databases – both private and public – have been compromised by criminals. A recent incident in Texas resulted in the theft of millions of teachers' social security numbers and information about their retirement benefits. This information is typically sold to mafia organizations on the black market. With the right information, identities can be forged and used to commit crimes ranging from money laundering to identity theft, voter fraud, or bank fraud. In one case, the information was not sold, but simply posted freely on the Internet using services like RapidShare and WikiLeaks, which keep poster identities secret. Identity theft is the fastest growing crime in the nation, and more than ten percent of Americans have been a victim of identity theft.

Defending against identity theft of this nature is only possible by preventing it on an individual basis. Services like myID.com have risen in response to the growing demand for consumer privacy protection. MyID searches these national databases for member information, and, if found, alerts the user and helps them opt-out and have their information purged. Since many consumers are not aware that having personal information publicly available also places them at a higher risk of identity theft, myID in includes features like the ID Theft Risk Score, which tracks how a user's identity theft risk changes over time, and an identity theft alert system, which notifies users if their identity may have been compromised and used to open bank accounts, credit cards, or car loans. Historically, instances of identity theft have gone years without being noticed; early alerts allow myID customers to stop identity theft before it gets out of control.

Many privacy watchdogs say the government should do more to prevent companies from buying, selling, or collecting information about people. Europe is more progressive than the United States in this respect, with database privacy laws enabling users to opt out of all advertiser tracking, similar to the Do Not Call list. Though the American government has made minor strides, like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which protects the privacy of medical records, there are no laws preventing corporate data mining, and thus far companies are not required to allow users to opt out.

Many businesses are making a lot of money selling personal information, a practice that will likely increase in value in the future as emerging technology allows advertisers to better use personal information to increase the value of their advertising efforts. This has led to business opportunities for companies who guard members' privacy against such efforts. As technology advances, the ability for companies to collect and trade information about people will increase. Finding a balance between convenience and privacy will be a debate facing advertisers, privacy advocates, and legislators over the next decade. If consumer information is not protected by the government, companies and criminals will freely trade personal information like any other commodity. Careful use of one's own personally identifying information, including opting out of advertising and marketing databases, might reduce the risk of having personal information stolen, but the only way to ensure information security is to have it removed completely using a identity theft monitoring solution like myID.

Check for Identity Theft with myID

Consumers cannot keep all of their information private. Protect your personal information with myID, which alerts you when your personally identifying information is accessible, helps you have your information purged, and alerts you in real-time to threats to your identity so you can take immediate action to stop unauthorized use.

Computer security professionals have long faced a dilemma when it comes to password security. If passwords are too small or easy to remember, they can be quickly hacked by a determined attacker. On the other hand, passwords that are too complex are often written down on post-it notes, making them ineffective against people with physical access.

Researchers have demonstrated that secure passwords need not be hard to remember. Though a password like "Jt3

The researchers illustrate two key points. First, password length is far more important than password diversity. A twelve or sixteen character password made up of only English words can take longer to break than a seven character password composed of letters and numbers. This is due to the way passwords are cracked, called brute force.

In a brute force attack, a hacker will try every possible combination of passwords until the correct password is entered. For every additional character included in the password string, the hacker's time to break the password increases substantially. Not to mention, so long as the hacker doesn't know that your password contains only letters, he will have to include numbers and special characters in the attack anyway, adding a layer of security based solely on obscurity.

The researchers suggested that passphrases always contains at least three words, preferably not all words that can be found in a dictionary. Such passphrases might be, for example, "fluffy is puffy," "Passphrases are cool," "mary wears blue jeans."

The power of the passphrase has already been recognized by major retailers such as Amazon, which encourages users to use a passphrase for one-click purchasing.

The take-home message is this: longer passwords are far more important than passwords with lots of special characters, and the easiest way to get longer passwords is to join together three or four words. In the future, you might find the password field on most applications evolving into a passphrase field, in order to promote the use of longer passwords.

Smartphone users collect apps, especially the free ones. But, unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Smartphone apps collect data about you as you use them, and many deliver this data not only to the app owner but to third parties as well.

An investigative report by the Wall Street Journal found that iPhone and Android apps routinely track and send data such as your age, gender, location, phone ID, phone number, contacts and usage habits to anonymous parties, angering many users concerned with privacy on the Internet.

According to the report, the big offenders are not the ones you might expect. Angry Birds and Pandora are two of the biggest offenders. Even apps one might assume were mindful of concerns about personal information on the Internet, such as the CBS News app, routinely send location and identification details to undisclosed third parties. Best-in-breed apps include Facebook, YouTube, and ESPN ScoreCenter, which transmit no data to third parties and only send limited data to their parent companies.

The privacy settings on some apps, like the bi and gay social networking app Grindr, is appalling. Grindr sends age, gender, location, and identification information to various third parties for marketing purposes. Are Grindr users even aware of this breach of their personal privacy? It’s unlikely that many read the privacy policy before signing up. Of the 101 apps reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, 45 did not have a published privacy policy. And, many apps simply do not allow users to opt-out of phone tracking.

The most widely shared piece of personal information on the Internet is the phone’s unique identifier number. This number cannot be changed, deleted, or modified, and it is forever attached to a single phone’s usage history. The number one recipient of this unique identifier number is Google. They use this identifier as part of their advertisement targeting service. In essence, Google’s advertising department has a history of your cell phone usage, including download history, what games you play, and how long you play them for.

Not all third-parties are the same. For games with millions of installs, like Angry Birds, companies pay big bucks for collated and organized user identifying data, and though Apple and Google have both encouraged app developers to maintain user privacy through privacy policies, opt-out procedures, opt-in tracking, and collecting data anonymously, apps are not required to include any of these features in either marketplace. In essence, your privacy on the Internet is protected only by the scruples of the app developers themselves.

Protect Your Privacy with myID

myID monitors your privacy in real-time and instantly alerts you to threats or changes so you can be safely public online. myID is an early-warning system for privacy concerns such as identity theft.

WordPress blog visibility settings offer three levels of privacy for your blog. The default setting allows everyone, including search engines, to access your blog. The second, more limited setting, blocks search engines from crawling your blog, and requires users to input your URL directly. If you’d like to make your WordPress blog completely private, the third setting, found under the radio button “I would like my blog to be visible only to users I choose”, allows you to invite specific users to your access your blog. These options are found under Settings, and then Privacy.

If you’d like to make a particular post private so that only you or a select group of people can see it, use the post editor and select Visibility in the Publish pane. You can choose to make the post either password protected, in which case you’ll need to supply a password, or private, which means that only you and other blog contributors will be able to see it. Click OK to make your selections effective immediately.

By changing privacy settings of your WordPress blog, you can protect your privacy and be sure only approved users read your content.

Maximize Privacy on Social Networks with MyID

MyID alerts you when your personal information is found online, including on blogs using WordPress. Try MyID to help protect your personal information privacy on social networks.

Surveys report that the average American is worried about personal information privacy. For good reason, too – newly declassified files detail massive FBI efforts at data-mining.

Carl Caldwell, the president of Right-to-Know, released the following statement: “FBI files can begin with records as simple as bankruptcy, Veteran Administration activities, income tax difficulties, and passport and visa problems. More than 200 classifications like these are given to the files the FBI considers confidential, secret or top secret. An individual’s attempts to retrieve this information are often thwarted by the complexity of the system itself.” Caldwell continues, “As the government gains access to more and more aspects of a private citizen’s life in the name of preventing terrorism, more ordinary people will unknowingly become targets of investigation, and more files will be gathered on the innocent.”

FBI databases contain tens of thousands of records from car-rental companies, hotels, and national department stores. The system can correlate data from different sources to automatically identify terrorists, and was able to locate a suspected Al Qaeda operative hiding in Houston. It also discovered that members of a Pakistani terrorist group were working in Philadelphia as taxi drivers. And, when the United States government lost track of terror suspects during the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, the system was able to track down and find them spread across the southern United States.

Opponents, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (a non-profit with the stated goal to protect online privacy), believe data-mining is the first step toward an Orwellian control over the population. EFF cites a National Research Council paper that concluded “data mining is a dangerous and ineffective way to identify potential terrorists, which will inevitably generate false positives that subject innocent citizens to invasive scrutiny by their government.”

The FBI hopes to add more sources of information to their database, including airline manifests from the Department of Homeland Security, the Postal Service’s change of address database, the national Social Security number database, and 24 other unidentified databases redacted in the released report.

Whether or not sacrificing personal information privacy is worth catching suspected terrorists is up to the individual to decide. There are immediate steps one can take to protect online privacy and prevent government efforts to scour social networking sites for personal details.

MyID and Personal Information Privacy

MyID helps you manage your personal information privacy, and alerts you when your personal details are publicly accessible via the Internet. MyID can help configure settings to maximize privacy on social networks and stop online ad tracking.