Identity Protection

Can we be safe? (and from who?)

Is it feasible to maintain a reasonable level of privacy in our modern world?

Even if we aren’t concerned with the government or a legitimate business abusing our information, should we be concerned with “Identity Theft”?

I’ll try to avoid repeating the obvious advice that most articles give for protecting yourself. Go read one of those, here I will try to only emphasize the important or less well known ideas.

The first defense is to be aware of the threat. “Social Engineering” is the biggest threat and the most common trick people fall for. Facebook, Instagram and the others have already fooled billions of people into voluntarily handing over a massive amount of data.

Understand that Data Brokers can legally collect and sell your information to anyone that will buy it. Forget trying to manually request each data broker to delete your information. They will, but then they will immediately start rebuilding a profile on you. If you are willing to pay $9 a month you can use a service like

https://joindeleteme.com/

to have your data erased constantly.

Another tactic is to allow incorrect or out of date data to remain in circulation so that the data the data brokers sell on you is unreliable and inaccurate.

To protect against social engineering, the key step is to always be the initiator of any contact. If someone else contacts you asking for sensitive / personal information you should be immediately skeptical, refuse to give out the information and verify the situation through an independent method (don’t just email back or call back a number they provided).

Second is to slow down. Never quickly respond, always give yourself time for the logical part of your mind to question the situation.

One thing I do, is never to do anything financial on a phone. Sure it’s convenient, but with convenience there is almost always a weakening of security. Phones are a security weak point, try to not have anything confidential on your phone!

For incoming physical mail, it’s a very good idea to have a locking mailbox. For outgoing mail, always take it to the post office yourself.

Cash isn’t as convenient as credit cards, but fewer electronic transactions means fewer opportunities to be compromised. The other major advantage of cash is the mental reminder that you are spending real money, not some imaginary number in a bank account. Any time you purchase something with a credit card, you have linked yourself to the purchase whereas cash maintains a lot more anonymity.

Avoid popular technologies. If you don’t have a PayPal account then it’s easy to laugh at the scam emails referencing your PayPal account. Linux is a lower profile target than Windows.

Use Rumble instead of YouTube whenever possible. Avoid Facebook like the plague. Minimize usage of any other popular sites such as Twitter. Unless you are actively hunting for a job you may want to not have a profile on LinkedIn. Never use Gmail for actual correspondence. I haven’t checked my Gmail in years even though it is of course “me” for everything Google.

Use a privacy oriented, email service that offers encryption such as Proton or Tuta.

Brave or Firefox are much better choices for a browser than Chrome or Microsoft’s Edge. Do not install extensions / plugins into your browser! Even “verified” extensions are frequently malware! Use multiple browsers so that you do not look like the same person to every website. Never use Google as your search engine.

Help clean the Internet. When you want to share a link, don’t click on it, copy it, then paste it into your browser and look for the end of the real URL and the ? that follows it. Delete that question mark and all the gibberish after it. Now hit enter and the webpage should be displayed without providing them with a ton of other information. Use that simpler basic URL to share with others.

Do not install any apps into your phone except ones you definitely want and “need”.

Your email address and your phone number are now the most widely used identifiers of who you are. That means that you must always keep your phone secure and out of the hands of others and you must guard your email password as if it was a national secret.

This subject can’t skip at least a brief mention of passwords. Do not re-use passwords. Every website, every account should have it’s own unique password. Use a good password manager like KeePass so that you don’t need to remember passwords and don’t need to keep them short and easy.

What does a VPN do for you? A VPN masks your Internet activity from your ISP. It does not make you anonymous! Do not use “free” VPNs.

In 2017, people spent seven billion dollars on identity theft protection services. Doesn’t it seem like a scam to get you to pay to not have your information abused? These companies can’t actually prevent identity theft, what they do is monitoring to detect it quickly.

Find your own level of comfort with doing some work to make it harder on those who would abuse your data, vs convenience of just not worrying about it. Balance is a key to life. Understand and accept your own level of paranoia that you are comfortable with.

At this point in life, I’m rather cynical and believe we have to accept that we live in a surveillance state and the best we can practically expect is to be able to create plausible deniability.

How concerned are you about this problem? Have you had difficulty proving who you were? Is there anyone that does not know your social security number? Are you resigned to being slave number 123-45-6789?