Are you a member of any of the social networking sites such as Facebook, Friends Reunited and MySpace? If you are, you could be leaving yourself wide open to fraud.
Emma-Lou Montgomery, writing in an article for MSN, says that visiting these sites is 'the 21st century equivalent of peering through your neighbour’s windows – only this time you’ve got millions of ‘neighbours’ whose lives others can nose into 24 hours a day'. And whilst you're busy finding out what old friends are doing now, what they look like and who they're married to, you're sharing cyberspace with opportunists and experienced criminals who are also searching - for personal data they can use to commit crimes such as identity theft - data including maiden names, dates of birth, children's names, even the names of childhood pets which, apparently, many people use as passwords...
Read Emma-Lou Montgomery's article here. (I must admit that, after reading the article, I visited my own profiles on various sites and deleted a few details!)
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