Your Internet "Foot Print" is Not as Big as You Think!

For years there have been articles and news reports on nearly a daily basis about how open and vulnerable we all are on the internet. The articles and reports project an image that our lives are all an open book on the net waiting for some unscrupulous person to find out everything about us from our home address to our shoe size and when we were first potty trained.

That simply is not true – on the whole.

Yes there is some information about you on the internet. But no more than what is already easily obtained from a phone book or public records.

Putting aside for the sake of this article the crimes of fraud and general hackers, the real detailed information about you and your life simply is not on the internet – unless you put it out there!

You have to put all the detailed information about yourself and your family out there for others to find (or provide it to someone else for them to put out there). That is you have to purposely go out onto the internet and create things like Myspace, Facebook, and LinkedIn pages about yourself for others to have personal information about you. Or create a personal website or blog and use your real name. Or join Classmates or one of the other school/reunion web sites. Or a dating website.

Even posting on message boards doesn't automatically leave a "cyber trail" as some have put it because most people don't use their real names on message boards. And you'd be a fool to do that anyway (at least on the vast majority of message boards).

In short, it really is a lot harder to find out detailed personal information about someone on the internet unless they themselves put that information out there. That's not to say caution can be thrown to the wind. But just being connected to the net doesn't make your life an open book to the world.

Such panic sells newspapers and makes ratings. But the truth isn't all that sensational.

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