This article appears in the December issue of Kiplinger Magazine. I'm a privacy nut anyway (and a germphobe, but that's a topic for another day), so of course it freaked me out a bit. One of the many reasons I don't have a Facebook page is the privacy factor. I do have a LinkedIn page, but it's super bland. You might think "she's a privacy freak but she has a blog.." True, but I completely control what goes here AND you'll note I don't blog under my own name or use other identifying info either.
I did go to some of the websites listed in the article. One got my age wrong by over 2 decades, oops. Another was scary though. It had the last 3 cities in which I've lived in this state. I was even more shocked as it had my correct age along with the names of my parents and siblings all correctly spelled. Yikes.
My point in this post is to make you think about the information that is available about you online. Can you control all of it? No way. Can you make a dent? Yes. Should you? Yes.
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When I started my job over a decade ago, the ID numbers on our insurance cards were our social security numbers. This completely freaked me out naturally. As a direct result of my pushing my boss (the head of HR) to make the insurance company assign us different numbers, we have been free of this practice for years, well before many other companies did this. We all have power to affect our privacy. It's up to us to use it.
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