It is a very widely known fact that social networking websites like MySpace, Orkut and Facebook are an excellent way of keeping in touch with friends and family, but at the same time what many people fail to realize is that these social networking websites also pose a serious threat in terms of identity theft. This article discusses a few great tips that help protect your self from online identity theft without taking out the fun part from social networking websites.

Social networking websites are accessible to any tom, dick and Harry who has a computer and an internet connection at his or her disposal. Thus, any and all information you enter into your social networking profile is easily available through the various search options provided by such social networking websites. Most people do not go ahead and enter their real postal addresses into their profiles, but they do tend to put in other personal information like their birthdays, where they were born and brought up, full names, and so on. But, they fail to realize that sometimes this kind of information available on your profile on social networking websites may also be used by online predators and other such professional identity thieves to access more personal details of your life.

One of the better ways and one of the simplest ones, to protect your social networking profile is to set your personal profile to private. Most social networking websites like Orkut, Facebook, MySpace, etc. provide this feature, which allows a user to control who can access your personal social networking profile and who cannot. When you have set this option to private, you only allow your personal friends access to your information. Thus you succeed at reducing the risk of identity theft greatly and at the same time you still have fun with social networking.

Another easier way to protect your online social networking profile is to refrain from divulging any and all kind of private and personal information, while creating an online social networking profile. This includes not posting your address, telephone number, and other such information on pages that are accessible to, not only you, but the rest of the world too. A good example of identity theft in this case would be, for e.g.: You write a message on your MySpace social networking profile page, something like this “off to Hawaii for a vacation, write back ASAP” – this kind of post will not only heighten the risk of identity theft, but will also give the identity thief the knowledge that you are out of town for vacation and there is no one home. Armed with this information, someone can rob you or worse. Hence, do refrain from posting critical information on your social networking profiles.

Last but not the least; do think before posting anything online. Maybe, ask yourself this, whatever information you are posting on a social networking website, would you want the same information to be printed on flyers and distributed all throughout the world. If the answer is no, in which case you should refrain from posting the information or maybe change it in a manner that it does not divulge something you don’t want the world to know.

Todd Dickerson is a social networking expert and full-time web developer. His sites such as http://www.ThemeGuys.com provide free myspace layouts and other cms themes.

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