I created a Face book group for filePro

[Fairlight]

Confusious (John Hemmer) say:
> 
> I know employers are starting to check these social networking sites to get
> more information about prospective employees.

Which is effectively discrimination, as what you do outside the office is
none of their beeswax unless you fail your drug testing.

> Hi Richard,
>
> If Employers are checking these sites what is to prevent theives who
> steal identities from finding out about you to do their thing? What is
> used for security?

Common sense.  And an inherent inability to link someone with their web
site unless there's a paper trail.  If someone doesn't have a vanity
domain for a personal web site (or if one pays for privacy features in the
'whois' entry--a practise with which I -strongly- disagree, as it makes
it near impossible to reach a Responsible Party for a domain/business),
well the only way they're going to be correlatable is if they're stupid
enough to post their phone number, address, or other specific identifying
information that they shouldn't.

Actually, I suppose that posting a photo or video of yourself can identify
you as ,"Hey, that's definitely the John Smith that applied!"  But short of
that, only blatant user stupidity is going to get you into actual ID Theft
issues.

Keep in mind that I'm a computing security fanatic.  That said, ID Theft
is arguably the biggest racket since they invented Insurance.  You
can't even have a credit card or bank account these days without being
blatantly harrassed by your provider for "ID Theft Insurance".  If you look
carefully, the policies by and large do almost nothing to actually give
you more net protection than you'd otherwise have.  You're not legally
responsible for any bills you dispute, or fraudulent purchases, in most
cases, and the institution has to write it off in the end anyway.  At
worst, you're responsible for a very small dollar amount--which is about
all they'd negate if it ever came to that.  Other than that, the policies
I've been offered run up to $12/mo per card and offer no protection above
what you inherently receive by law if you behave as a responsible consumer,
report theft and abuse immediately and appropriately, and aren't a
completely irresponsible party.

I don't deny ID Theft exists.  I deny the way it's represented to the
public in a scare campaign designed to pad the wallets of financiers.  The
reality is that the REALLY BIG cases of ID Theft actually originate at the
creditor's end.  There have been several systems break-ins in recent years
yielding 600k, 900k, and 1.5mil+ sets of private information at a time.
These happened at banks and credit card companies themselves, not on the
consumer/vendor side of things.  I haven't seen a study, but it would not
surprise me, if one was done, to see that you actually have a higher risk
of ID Theft at the financial institution's side than you do using your card
online, at the store, whatever.  Wouldn't even blink.  They're playing off
people's utter fear of financial ruin in order to inflate a revenue stream
they've been able to generate based on a fairly low number of high profile
cases.

As with every form of risk/insurance, the tactic is to scare you to death,
then empty your wallet when you "willingly" give in to the scare tactics.
There's good security and there's paranoia.  People still balk at buying
things online, despite encryption standards.  You have more exposure
flashing your card at Wal*Mart or a restaurant, and millions of people a
day do that.

Follow common sense in screening what you post, and your exposure is next
to nil.  No address, no SSN, no financial information at all, limit your
age displays to age rather than date of birth...the usual.

mark->