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March 4, 2008

Facebook Identity Theft Protection Guide: 6 tips to protect your identity on Facebook

Posted by Joe

[Editor's note: Looking for information on Facebook's most recent privacy updates? See our new guide to Facebook's privacy settings. Read below for tips on other things you can do to keep yourself secure on the social networking site. ]

With over 66 million active users and nearly a quarter million new people signing up every day, Facebook is one of the fastest growing social networking websites in the United States. Unfortunately, many of the characteristics that make Facebook a great social network also open up Facebook users to a variety of identity theft related crimes.

NextAdvisor.com has compiled a list of 6 simple tips in our Facebook Identity Theft Prevention Guide below. The goal of this guide is to help raise awareness of those identity theft risks related to Facebook use as well as provide some steps that Facebook users can take to help protect themselves from being victimized by identity thieves.

Tip #1: Limit the amount of personal information available on your Facebook profile.

A recent poll of Facebook users commissioned by NextAdvisor.com found that 27% of respondents listed their full name, date of birth, phone number and email address on their Facebook profile. An additional 8% of respondents included all of that information plus their physical address on their profile. Many Facebook users also list other personal data such as their spouse or significant other's name or birth date. That type of personal information is extremely dangerous in the hands of identity thieves as it can be used to perpetrate various forms of identity theft.

For example, an identity thief may be able to use your home address and phone number to submit a change of address form with the United States Postal Service and have your mail forwarded. This would allow an identity thief to get access to additional sensitive information that would allow them to open financial or other accounts in your name.

This information can also be used by savvy identity thieves to help them hack into online accounts since contextual information in your profile can tip them off to potential user name and passwords you may use. Once an online account, whether it is an email, credit card or other account, has been accessed it can be used to cause even further harm. In one such example of this type of identity theft a college student used information from another student's Facebook profile page to gain access to their Apple.com account and order over $1,000 worth of products.

Our recommendation is to limit the amount of personal information that is available on your Facebook profile. Specifically:

Never list your full date of birth, phone number or physical address on your Facebook profile. Your real friends and associates will likely already know this information so including it on your profile will only increase your risk of being victimized by identity thieves.
Limit the amount of contextual password clues on your profile pages. Identity thieves know that many people use their birth day, a spouse or significant other's name or birth date, an anniversary date, mother's maiden name, pet's name or other personal information as passwords on their personal accounts. It is also a good idea to make sure your online passwords don't include these types of personal items since they are easily hacked.

Tip #2: Proactively manage your Facebook privacy settings.

[see our new guide to Facebook's privacy settings for updated information]

Because Facebook is a social networking site it is configured, by default, to make it very easy for other people to find you. For example, Facebook allows users to join networks which are groups of individuals that share a common trait such as having attended the same school or living in a certain metropolitan area. That means that if you join the network for the city you live in every other member of that city-based network will have access to your profile information. This means that potentially hundreds or thousands (or more) strangers could automatically have direct access to your profile.

The good news is that Facebook offers users a lot of control over their privacy setting within the "My Privacy" section of the site. This can be reached by clicking on the "Privacy" link in the upper right hand corner of any page on the Facebook website. From within the privacy section you have full control of all of your privacy settings and can fine tune who will have access to what aspects of your profile and your activity on the Facebook website.

Section: Profile