You can ensure you stay safer on campus just by sharing less personal information. This may seem impossible for college students with social media popularity continuing to rise.
What do you do?
It may seem difficult, but just by modifying your behavior a little bit, can go a long way to safeguarding yourself and your personal information from attack and identity theft.
Stop doing these things to minimize information sharing and your risk.
At a minimum, don’t:
- Stop Using a Weak Password – with technology today, remembering passwords is no longer necessary
- For Windows users – Check this out
- For Mac users – Check this out
- Stop Leaving Your Full Birth Date in Your Profile - less information for the identity thieves to collect
- Stop Overlooking Useful Privacy Controls - Okay, my pet peeve, when people complaining about policies they haven’t read on a site they don’t understand. Go into your settings and familiarize yourself with every setting, if you’re not sure about a setting, turn it off until you are.
- Stop Mentioning You’ll Be Away from Your Room/Town - You might as well put your address in the announcement too and save the thief that extra minute it takes to look up your address. If you didn’t know about (http://pleaserobme.com/) you may want to check it out.
- Don’t Enter Unsavory Chat Rooms
- Don’t Respond to Attempts to Engage in Inappropriate Discussions
- Never give out personal or contact information to a stranger (online or off)
If You’re the Parent, “Have the Talk”
Have the talk with your children about social media, what’s appropriate and what’s not. Review, supervise and stay on top of what your children are doing. Perpetrators prey in private.
Regardless, by sharing less personal information online, you minimize your risk of inviting unwelcome behavior directed at you. Just by shifting a few of your online habits, you can greatly minimize the chance of being a victim of crime on-campus (or off), online or off.
