Today is my alleged birthday! Let’s celebrate it with some free advice from a retired cyber security professional (i.e., me). One of the best ways to keep your identity from being stolen is to minimize the amount of personal information you give to social media sites. Among other things this means that if a web site (even a legitimate site) is asking for information they don’t truly need, then don’t give it to ’em. If the site won’t let you proceed without that information, consider lying to them. Hence my “alleged birthday.” Today is not my birthday, but Facebook (among other social media sites) thinks it is. All they need to know is whether I am at least X number of years old, which I am, so I’m not misrepresenting anything by giving them a different date.

And ya know those “security questions” that some sites make you fill out, so they can “verify” it’s really you if you forget your password? Well, the answers to many of these questions aren’t all that secret, so it would be easy for an identity thief to find the answers and thus be able to be “verified” as being you. For example, a common security question is: “Where did you go on your honeymoon?” When initially selecting these questions and filling in the answers, don’t put in the actual location of your honeymoon. Instead, type in something like, “Oprah’s Bowels”. But beware: this information may end up being needed to recover your account some day, so make sure your phony answers are things you will definitely remember (including punctuation and capitalization), while also being as difficult as possible for someone else to guess.