Posted by garnet71 on July 2, 2009, at 2:04:02
The more accounts you have online with forums, social networks, blogs, and other media (I'm not talking about email), the more risk you expose youself to.
From one post here, if you participate in mulitiple blogs, forums, social networks, etc, a person can find out your full name and where you live (and now map to your house with a picture of your car parked in front of it--sometimes with the license plate number in view).
There are forensic & security IT people who work for the govt. and do this for a living. But you really don't have to have that training to trace a person in many cases-i've seen it done before by one of those people and it isn't that difficult once you've seen it in action. I would guess there are non-security related people who do this.
This is true regardless of whether you hide/make private your facebook details and use multiple avatars, logins, screenames. It's a very divergent, contextual process that requires no advanced IT skills or software--it's easy and works almost all the time with people who spread themselves out to multiple sites.
If you keep your comments in one or two places, it's a lot more difficult for even experienced IT security people to trace you. It has nothing to do with hacking or special software/hardware, like I said, anyone fairly intelligent person with a computer and internet access can do it.
It sounds like common sense, but you would not believe how easy it is to read one person's comment here, and connect it to the next, then the next place, forum, site, etc. until you've found out their full name and adress. The more breadcrumbs you leave, the easier this is to do. If you keep your 'stuff' in just a couple places, you are so much safer.
I think a forum that is designed as a community for people mental health issues where some of us are more vulnerable and/or _____(i'll leave the rest to imagination) would be more sensitive to this when compared to other types of online communities.
poster:garnet71
thread:904428
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20090529/msgs/904428.html