GulfNews.com takes a look at what you can do to protect yourself from fraud across the Web.
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From the monthly archives:
April 2008
5 Ways to Protect Your Online Identity and Personal Privacy
Your personal information is online and getting more accessible every day. So how can you manage your online reputation and privacy in this cyber world where walls don’t exist?
Here are five ways in which Internet users can ensure that their online identity is correctly positioned and that their personal information is protected:
1. Take Responsibility for Your Online Actions
Most people believe that what they post on a blog or upload will stay hidden behind a wall and never be seen anywhere else on the web – This is false. Always make sure to read the terms of service on websites and social networks and assess their privacy control options. With over 500,000 people joining a social network every day, the number of people who post content about themselves on the web is increasing rapidly and so is the need for them to understand how the web works. If you post a picture of yourself on a public website, it’s as if you posted that picture on a billboard in Time Square. It becomes public content for anyone to see and copy. You really don’t want that recruiter to see your online party photos. So be careful of what you post and do online.
2. Track Your Online Profile
Search for your name – If you find something you do not like, then you can reach out to search engines like Spock, Google, Yahoo and MSN to remove that content from their index. But bear in mind that even if these search engines remove the content in question, it is most likely that that information was crawled by other services that might not have the same respect for personal privacy. Go to the source of the content itself and either remove it yourself (your public social network pages, blog posts) or ask the website administrators to assist you.
3. What Do You Do When Your Personal Information is Out There
Background checking is a billion dollar industry. There are dozens of companies out there that buy your personal data from phone companies, banks, even from your local county records office and sell it online to anyone willing to pay for the data. Once I did a search for myself on Google and to my surprise my former home address was indexed – This had been taken from a third party site. Not cool! At Spock we have a clear policy for people search to only display data that exists on the public web – We never show personally identifiable information (address, phone number, email, and so on) even if it is on public sites. These are steps I would recommend if you find yourself in the same predicament:
- Contact your bank, phone service provider, and your county records office – Be very clear to them that you do not want your private information sold to a third-party.
- Contact the site where you found your information and ask them to remove it immediately. Most of these companies do not want to deal with legal action and thus are fairly responsive in removing such data.
- Make it very clear to these sites that you do not want them to display your private information ever again.
4. Be Wary of Uncertified Websites
Too many people trust unknown websites and give them personal information for a “Free iPhone” and similar freebies. If you see an offer like this online from an uncertified site, then don’t fill out the form – Unless you want to get a lot of spam, phone calls, and random letters in the mail from cyber salesmen.
5. Even Passwords Need to be Protected
An area that many people tend to overlook is the passwords they use on websites. When choosing a password, these are my recommendations:
- Don’t use a password that contains any combination of your birthday, social security number, or phone number. There are too many websites out there with poor security protocols which can easily be hacked.
- Never use the same password twice. A common trick of hackers is to fool people into giving them their password – Ever get one of those phishing emails asking you to reset your password for Paypal? The best way to protect yourself against identity theft is to use different passwords for different services.
- Change your passwords every six months.
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The NBA playoffs began over the weekend, and after one of the more compelling regular seasons in NBA history, the buzz surrounding the league is at an all time high. TVWeek.com, reported that the NBA on ABC earned a 2.5 rating, up 9% in households from 2007. ESPN and TNT showed similar growth with a 10% jump, earning a 1.1 rating for the season.
From a television ratings standpoint, NBA executives are without a doubt hoping that the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers face off in the finals. While a Lakers and Celtics match up makes sense from a ratings perspective, Spock looked at some of the people search figures surrounding the sixteen playoff teams to see which two teams would generate the biggest fan buzz.
Individually, the most searched NBA players on Spock were Kobe Bryant and Yao Ming. Shaquille O’Neil and Jason Kidd also saw a 5% bump in their search activity following their trades in March. On the retail side, Kevin Garnett lead all NBA players in jersey sales, followed by Kobe Bryant and Allen Iverson. Garnett who plays for the Celtics, was part of the top team in jersey sales. Surprisingly after the Celtics, the most jersey sales were generated by the Bulls, Knicks and Heat, three teams that did not make the playoffs. Thus, from a strictly individual perspective, it would appear that the general public would prefer to see the Celtics and the Lakers.
In analyzing the overall popularity from a team perspective, Spock looked at traffic and tagging on Spock, blogs, average attendance, percentage attendance, and Myspace fan groups. On Spock the Lakers lead all teams in popularity with 5,976 fan related tags. The next most popular teams were the Utah Jazz, and Detroit Pistons. The Atlanta Hawks were the least popular team on Spock. Within the blogging community the Boston Celtics were the clear winners with over 12,000 fan blogs. The next closest teams were the the Dallas Mavericks with over 10,000 fan blogs, and the Houston Rockets with over 8,400 fan blogs. The Philadelphia Sixers remained the least popular team with around 435 fan blogs. In average attendance Detroit led all teams with an average of 22,076 fans. The next closest teams were the Cleveland Cavaliers and Dallas, with the New Orleans Hornets averaged the least number of fans with 14,181. While Detroit led in average attendance, Dallas led the league in percentage attendance with 105.07. Looking at Myspace fan pages, the Lakers were again the most popular team with the two largest fan groups totaling 15,677 members. As a whole, it would appear that while attendance figures are about even between the Eastern Conference and Western Conference, there was a larger internet fan base for the Western Conference. While this could be attributed to the Western Conference teams having more fans, this is likely due to the fact that with the exception of Detroit and Boston the Eastern Conference as whole was far less competitive compared to the rest of the league.
In the end while the network executives may favor a Boston vs Los Angeles match up, based on the people search figures, a Dallas vs Detroit NBA finals would draw the greatest fan buzz.
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Spock Co-Founder Jay Bhatti recently appeared on Reuters to discuss Spock and the notion behind people search. Spock which is unique in its focus on people search has received numerous accolades, including being recently named as one of the top 100 Rails Sites, and Wired Magazinestop 10 startups in 2008. In being asked about the notion behind competing with the likes of Google in the search market, Bhatti notes that while Google’s focus is on comprehensive document retrieval, people search in general is still fragmented across the web. Hoping to create a search result for everyone, Spock has focused on creating a site where you’ll be confident that the information about every “John Smith” is correct and relevant.
Click Here to check out the video
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The Yahoo! Deal
What Microsoft Could Do For Yahoo! Employees
Wendy Tanaka, 04.11.08, 6:30 PM ET – PDF Version – Link to Article
Despite the flurry of activity from background players in theYahoo!-Microsoft deal saga this week, many industry watchers still believe that the software giant may well prevail in its campaign to acquire Yahoo!. And typically, when one industry titan swallows another, job losses follow.
So should Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news- people ) employees be working on their résumés?
In this case, maybe not.
To achieve the promised “cost savings” that executives like to forecast when they’re acquiring a company, layoffs do often follow. In a late February speech at a Goldman Sachs (nyse: GS - news -people ) investment conference conference, Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT -news - people ) Executive Craig Mundie conceded that job losses would likely follow a Microsoft-Yahoo! combo. “The reason we think there’s synergies, actually, even in the R&D side, is that there’s a lot of redundant development going on,” Mundie said.
“The search engines are both being developed right next to each other in two different companies, and many other components, the whole advertising system. Every one of these things is being redundantly developed by two groups of very, very smart people. At the end of the day, you don’t need both. There may be great components from the two of them, and over time you could smoosh them together, but there’s a lot of fungibility in that part of the investment.”
But not all those losses are likely to happen in Sunnyvale, say industry watchers.
Microsoft’s primary reason for buying Yahoo! is to combine forces and go head-to-head with Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) in the burgeoning online advertising market. That means Microsoft will have to handle the Sunnyvale, Calif., Internet portal’s workers with kid gloves if it wants to keep top talent and ensure a smooth integration of the two companies. “If Microsoft is going to treat Yahoo! people as second-class citizens, a lot of good people will leave,” says Kiumarse Zamanian, a former Yahoo! advertising executive.
In Yahoo!, Microsoft is gaining a tremendous asset: the world’s premier consumer Internet portal with 500 million visitors a month. “This is not a traditional acquisition. Microsoft needs to tread lightly,” says Burton Group analyst Ken Anderson. “They’re going after something more valuable than acquiring market share–Yahoo! is considered one of the most successful Internet start-ups.”
Indeed, Microsoft’s attempts to create blockbuster consumer and media properties through its MSN division have failed. “Microsoft is an engineering company. They don’t know how to sell ads,” IDC analyst Karsten Weide says. “What drives this business is media, understanding what advertisers and consumers want.”
While Yahoo! gives Microsoft a bounty of media and consumer assets, the software giant’s aggressive business style can capitalize on them, something Yahoo! couldn’t do. “It’s a Microsoft-run Yahoo!,” Anderson says. “Microsoft is very aggressive in how they run a corporation.”
So it’s Microsoft’s portal employees, not Yahoo! workers, that should be worrying about their jobs. “If I am an MSN online guy I’d be a little nervous,” Anderson says.
Jay Bhatti, co-founder of search engine start-up Spock and a former Microsoft product manager, still keeps in touch with workers in Redmond–and more than a few are concerned about their future. “A lot of people who work at MSN are saying, ‘What’s going to happen to us?’ ” Bhatti says.
Nevertheless, Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo!, announced Feb. 1, has created fear and loathing in the ranks of both companies. Since the announcement, Bhatti says the number of résumés Spock has received from Microsoft and Yahoo! workers has tripled. To shore up lackluster financials, Yahoo! laid off 1,000 of its 14,000 workers in February.
Even though Microsoft has said it will keep the Yahoo! brand after the acquisition, some aren’t convinced Chief Executive Steve Ballmer and his gang will stick to their promise. Zamanian, the former Yahoo! ad executive who is now vice president of Glam Media’s advertising platform, notes: “There’s a joke: What do you get if you merge Microsoft and Yahoo!? Microsoft.’ “
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