Red Alert on Cyberspace: Cyber Crime: Protect Your Privacy!

Here is something that was published on Women’s Health online magazine:

A woman was having lunch with a friend and she took a snapshot of what she was having and posted it up on Twitter. (Doesn’t this sound like what we do now everyday?) A completed stranger tweeted her back, having found her public Twitter feed and tracked her down to the area she was having lunch at that time.

We see many people, if not ourselves, do this with their smart phones, taking pictures of food or with friends having a meal somewhere and posting them up on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, FourSquare or some other social networks. Fortunately for that woman, the stranger was security engineer from a watchdog website called ICanStalkU.com that alerts Twitter users of the dangers of geotags. Geotags are GPS coordinates which are used in smart phones with the purpose of embedding the tags to the photographs automatically. With that, anyone can locate where you are when you share a photograph online publicly or update your status in your Facebook or any other social networks.

This is no paranoia as there can be more people tracking or stalking you than you think. Information is king and key to the extent of what a person can do. Just like in the case of a hacker who stole tens of thousands of credit card details and posted the numbers on CD Universe offering to provide further details for merely $1 per card (source: NBCNews.com).

Hence, the ball is first in your court to protect your personal information and privacy. The Privacy Awareness Week (an annual awareness campaign initiated by the Asia Pacific Privacy Authorities) in 2011 and 2012 focused on the theme Privacy: It’s All About You, in the race to create awareness on issues such as privacy protection and protection of personal information in the online environment.

A ten step guide was launched by the OAIC (Office of the Australian Information Commissioner) during the campaign, out of which everyone should take note of some of the steps:

Always read privacy policies and notices and go through the settings when you create a new online account
Only give out personal information that you need to, do not provide more information than necessary
Ask for access to your personal information when you provide them to an organization and find out what that information is used for
Take steps to protect your online privacy such as installing and updating trusted anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall protection, other security tools, deleting cookies and temporary internet files or clearing your cache, use trusted websites for banking and payments, and run through the account/profile/privacy settings to choose the settings that you want.