Reasons you should hide your e-mail and personal information

I know that you’re all bored silly with my requests to safeguard your personal information, so I’m putting this here and promise not to contact individual members anymore about this subject. If you insist on having your e-mail address or personal information available for viewing by anyone, then at least you’ve been warned.  To be honest, there are always going to be people who are needy enough to share way too much information, their names, locations and activities, things that help define and identify them.  They are the people/horses that you can lead to water...but, you know. There are reasons why you should hide your e-mail address and personal information on the Internet, and that includes our group. As manager of our group, I have information that allows me to contact you, especially if I should need to write to you in the event that we are hacked again. I don’t share your information with anyone, not even our wonderful, and completely trustworthy, assistant managers. If you allow your e-mail address to be viewed by other members, someone who wants to hack into your passport account can do so and is then able to get into all of your groups and cause problems, just by having your e-mail address. Someone can also use your e-mail to "spoof." This means that he/she can make posts, using your username/nickname by e-mailing the group without even having to get into your account. Even a fake e-mail address can be used in this way. If you allow your e-mail to be visible, every time you post or reply to a thread, your e-mail address will show up to the people who have opted to receive all postings in their e-mail boxes. If they add you to their e-mail address book(s), even inadvertently, you could be prey to other people in their address book(s), or have your address spoofed by viruses and the like. Even worse is that if you reply to a posted message that you received in your e-mail, and you respond without deleting the original message, your e-mail address could be posted on our site along with your reply. Since we want SOMers to be able to find us, our group is listed as a public group, with new members needing approval to join. That means that anyone on the Internet can read our message boards and potentially see your e-mail address We also have to worry about spammers, posing as SOMers who join groups just to harvest e-mail addresses. These people not only use your e-mail address for their own purposes, they also sell their address lists to other people.  If you think that this is unlikely to happen, we have had four such incidents.  One was a man who wanted to share his poetry.  Two were people that were admitted to our group and proceeded to post porn and links to porn sites.  These three found us in our first year, and were not able to do any damage before I got rid of them.  The fourth is more recent, and was discovered to be a spammer before admission to our group. As if that isn’t bad enough, commercial spiders (automatic computer programs) can grab your e-mail address and sell it to others, individuals or companies, without anyone having had to join our group. So, what can you do?  Be aware of what you are doing on the Internet.  Remember that anyone with a computer can read what you've written. Withhold your personal information as much as you can.  For example, do not give out your place of employment, the name of the team for which you play or the location of the park where you walk your dog.  Be aware that even listing your regular activities, state in which you live and the like can enable a determined person to locate you.  Do not post on our site, or anyplace else, your full, real name, address or telephone number. Do not use your primary, ISP-based e-mail address where it can be viewed by people you do not know. If your e-mail address must be viewable, use one of the widely available free, throw-away e-mail services so that if it is compromised, you can dump it. And, on our site, please, please use your "Member Tools" to access your e-mail settings at "Check your E-mail settings." Make sure that the little white box beneath your e-mail address, next to "Allow other group members to see my e-mail address.", does not have a check mark in it. If it does, click on the space to un-check it. Then scroll down to make sure that you click "Save Changes." If you absolutely, positively must have your e-mail address listed somewhere, list it in your profile information, but don’t use the @ sign. Instead do it this way:                    cutetwitcyeye at msn dot com © 2004 JC SOMPeople