Month: May 2022

Is your Facebook profile private? The implicit deal you strike when you sign up for any social media account is that you get to use their services for free in exchange for your privacy. You scroll, post, and message all while sites collect your data to serve you ads, and you hand over more and more personal information about yourself.

Facebook is notoriously careless when it comes to protecting your data. The company has been tangled in several privacy debacles in the last few years, from the Cambridge Analytica scandal to hacked accounts and security breaches. The site is also the biggest culprit when it comes to getting people to fork over their personal information. Your Facebook profile includes a long list of items that make you vulnerable: your name, age, birthday, hometown, current location, job history, education, marital status, family relationships, places you’ve checked into, even your likes and interests. All of this information can be used by bad actors to create a detailed dossier on you and your life, and target you for hacking and other threats.

Facebook does have privacy settings that allow users to make their profile pages private, semi-private, or totally public. But a private profile doesn’t protect you quite like you think. Even if it’s supposed to only be visible by friends, your profile is still open to indexing by search engines. A major threat to your privacy on Facebook is the security of your friend’s accounts. If one or more of your friends’ Facebook accounts is hacked, then the hacker will have access to your content and personal information.

Although it’s difficult to put a definitive number on how often social media accounts get hacked, we’ll just say it happens a lot. To give you an idea, Google reports that 20% of social accounts will be compromised at some point. Social engineering and phishing scams are the most common. Hackers can pretend to be Facebook to get you to hand over your login info and lock you out of your account. They can impersonate you, reading your posts to mimic your online voice, and scam your friends list, coworkers, and workplace. In the worst-case scenario, cyberstalkers can use your information—restaurants you’ve checked into, frequent locations, hometown, office location—to present a real-life threat.

Even if your information is completely hidden, there are a few other privacy-invasive settings that feel unsettling. For one, the platform uses facial recognition, and automatically tags you or a friend in a photo or video. Additionally, people you aren’t technically ‘friends’ with can see your posts by ‘following’ you instead, and you may not even notice. The privacy settings are an impossible to navigate labyrinth. New features that Facebook implements can inadvertently open up loopholes that people can exploit to view your content, even if you’ve opted to keep it private.

Creeped out yet? If deleting your Facebook isn’t an option, do everything you can to lock down your privacy settings and remove any personal information from your profile. Hush can help by finding, flagging and eliminating vulnerabilities from the Internet to keep your identity safe.

Categories: Uncategorized.

Remember the phone book? Back in the day, when you wanted to find a business’ phone number or a person’s address, you had to crack open those heavy tomes and scour the white or yellow pages. Telephone directories moved online in 1996, so now instead of physical books you have online directories and people-finding sites. With information moved online, the data used to find people is more detailed and accessible than ever.

“People search sites” such as Whitepages.com, are search engines based on public and sometimes private data. They list names, addresses, phone numbers, even family relationships and criminal histories. They assemble data points into a detailed dossier on who—and where—you are. Anyone with a credit card can pay to access your personal information. This can feel like an invasion of privacy and the process of opting-out is tedious, considering the hundreds of sites that are out there.

People search sites insist on their own helpfulness, designed to help friends or family reconnect. Yet there are no measures in place preventing people from wielding the information for malicious means. Whitepages asks visitors to disclaim that they won’t use the data for identity fraud or invasion of privacy, but it’s little more than an honor pledge, and the consequences are real. For example, the public exposure of your personal information can lead to doxxing, stalking, and physical threats. For domestic abuse survivors, it puts them at risk of being discovered by their abusers—it’s a matter of life and death.

In the case of writer and gaming programmer Kathy Sierra, the abuse she experienced online ended her career. In 2007, Sierra was targeted by a harassment campaign, facing rape and death threats. Hacker Andrew Auernheimer posted graphic doctored images of her, and doxxed her by spreading her address and Social Security number online. He later bragged about it to the New York Times. Sierra entirely withdrew from the Internet and the tech world to protect herself and her family’s safety. She gave up book deals, speaking engagements, and even fled her home.

Doxxing isn’t illegal if the information exposed is already public domain, although lawmakers are attempting to change that. Future laws could ban posting information online if there’s clear hostile intent behind it. However, they don’t prevent the initial problem, which is that there is no regulation of people searching sites and who has access to your personal information.

Until laws change or online directories become obsolete, what can you do to protect yourself? Uncovering every corner of the Internet where your personal data is exposed seems like an insurmountable task. Luckily, that’s where Hush comes in. We find, flag, and remove sensitive information that puts you at risk of being harassed, stalked, doxxed, or threatened. We protect your data and your privacy to help keep you and your identity safe.

Categories: Uncategorized.