More Protecting Yourself vs. Identity theft

With the proliferation of personal profile sites and blogs, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that whay you say can be used against you. There are two pieces of information that people often put online without realizing the danger for identity theft: birthdate and high school.

Obviously you should never post your full birthdate on an open forum, especially if you're not anonymous. If you want to put the date, leave off the year. This is a pirce of information that is asked over and over to verify your identity and probably not something you want to fall into the wrong hands.

The other is High School information. The growing trend in verification is to ask about high schools or mascots rather than mothers maiden name. With sites like myspace and friendster adding feature rich alumni groups, this information too can be readily obtained. If you do participate in features like this, don't use school information to verify.

Probably the smartest thing is just to make up information all together, like a password that you can remember.