These days, many consumers who use the Internet every day may want to have a sizable "Web presence," particularly if they are self-employed in some way, as a means of making it as easy as possible to find out about them.
But experts say that this practice also puts them at a greater risk for having their sensitive personal information stolen by identity thieves, according to a report from
McClatchy Newspapers. For this reason, those with a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, personal website and more, it's important to limit what personally identifying data is available, and make as many of those accounts private as possible.
For those who cannot, it's also important to diversify passwords as much as possible so that, even if a hacker guesses one correctly, they won't be able to access all accounts, the report said. It's often a good idea to mix up numbers, letters and symbols in a password, and best to make them a random assortment of those characters, rather than one that may be decipherable.
Ondrej Krehel, the chief privacy officer for
Identity Theft 911, has a blog about the ways in which consumers can protect themselves from hackers.
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