Mike Elgan at ComputerWorld has an excellent story about how social networking sites can expose personal information and compromise your privacy in ways you might not have ever considered. This is an area that I am personally becoming more focused upon since my experience with Google Buzz.
One area that I’ve tried to tighten down on is my gmail account. For years, I have been used to hitting the “Archive” button rather than the “Delete” button when I’m through with an email. I had over 10,000 emails in my “All Mail” folder. Many of these were messages from financial institutions like banks and credit card companies. I realized that if someone managed to hack my gmail account they would easily be able to figure where I had bank and credit card accounts.
There’s not an easy way to dump your entire “All Mail” folder either since that folder also includes emails that you have labeled to place into a specific folder in order to keep around. The only solution I found was to delete everything and then go to the “Trash” folder and search for my labeled messages, move those back to my Inbox and then archive them from there. There might be an easy way to do this but I couldn’t figure it out.
Now, I’m following the practice of explicitly hitting the “Delete” button on every email that I decide I no longer want to keep around. I’m also taking pains to unsubscribe from each of these accounts so they don’t keep sending me emails that I didn’t ask for in the first place. I’ve also cleaned up my Google Docs to make sure nothing in there would be of any value to online criminals.
Yes, it’s true. We have no privacy anymore. But we can do things to make it harder for the crooks.
Hey Bill,
I have to admit that it would never have occurred to me to archive my emails to some unknown location. I’ve always put them on my computer, so they will be of use to anyone who steals it.
So if I never used the archive feature, then I don’t have anything stored out there where it could be vulnerable?
thanks,
jg