Don’t Share Your Information in Facebook Memes
Look, we’re all guilty of participating in one or two rash memes, and it’s all fun and games until your identity is stolen.
As tech editor Mic Alexis Kleinman tweeted, those seemingly harmless Facebook questions you comment to while away your time at work aren’t always as harmless as they seem. People can use them to collect your personal information:
Kleinman wrote about this here .
A year ago, online privacy advocates warned people not to participate in a meme in which they listed 10 concerts, and friends guessed they weren’t. According to USA Today , this was often accompanied by a note about their first concert, which is a popular secret question.
While some professionals said the fears were exaggerated, others said they were open invitations for hackers. The safest option is to just avoid all questions. Or, as Lifehacker suggested , use fake security questions answers:
Your first car? Just write the car of your dreams or the car you plan to buy. Mother’s maiden name? Easy, just do it with whatever tedious, affectionate term she uses before asking you to cook the dishes. Until these answers are searchable, you should generate incorrect answers and keep them safe.
Of course, you want to be sure that you can track any false responses you come up with, and the security of new false responses means keeping them along with the rest of your data. Contact your favorite password manager to save your security questions and answers (or generate better ones). You can create a spreadsheet for all of them, or just write your questions and false answers in the note box of the respective site or service (assuming you already have them in the manager of your choice).
Here are some more safety pointers . Remember, everyone knows your mother’s maiden name, so choose a stricter Security Question. And maybe don’t post your royal wedding guest name on the public Facebook thread.