April 2018
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This is a bi-monthly compilation of questions that our clients have asked us recently!
I use Facebook to keep up with a few friends and relatives. Should I be concerned about the news reports I've been seeing about Facebook sharing out my personal information without letting me know? What information do they have? This question has come up a few times in connection with news reports that a British company named Cambridge Analytica gained unauthorized access to Facebook user data for political research and marketing activity in the U.S. The story is still unfolding and I won't try to go into details on the how and why this may have occurred. But the issues raised by the situation bear watching. In the meantime, if you have a Facebook account you now have the right to see all of the information Facebook has accumulated about you. Please note that Facebook is making the offer voluntarily and it may or may not be continued indefinitely. What they will provide includes the mundane stuff like your name, your age and birthday, your e-mail address and other biographical information you may have chosen to include at the time you signed up. What may be surprising is that since that first day, Facebook also has dutifully recorded every comment you ever made about a post, every advertising link you ever clicked, every friend you have accepted into your group (and those you may have subsequently UN-friended), every picture you ever posted or looked at, etc. In short, there are breadcrumbs of essentially every interaction you have ever had via Facebook since day one. Want to see your file? It's actually pretty easy to obtain. Log into your Facebook account in the usual manner with your favorite web browser. Once logged in, go to "Settings" (visible by clicking the little upside down triangle on the righthand side of the blue bar at the top of the page), select General Account Settings and go to the bottom of that page to a link that says "Download a copy of your Facebook data." You will have to jump through a couple of reasonable security hoops to confirm that you are really you in order to actually submit the request. Facebook will acknowledge the request by e-mail a few minutes later. Sometime later (maybe an hour or more, depending on the size of your file), you will get another e-mail with a link to download the information. Clicking the link will download what is known as a compressed "zip" file. If you double-click that "zip" file, it will in turn create a new folder containing your information. If you double-click a file in that folder called "index.htm," it will display all of your information in a manner that is quite easily navigated and viewed. Personally, I'm a pretty passive Facebook user but I was taken aback by the breadth of information that they have kept about my activities. I think the most important takeaway was that even things I thought were deleted never die. Things that I figured had just disappeared over the course of time continue to live on. Multiply this experience by every other website you have ever visited and every other social or businesss connection you've established via the internet and you begin to get a handle on the scope of the privacy concerns that are being raised in the online world today. If you want some help in getting to your Facebook data or just want to know more about what you can do to minimize your online digital footprint, Terri and I are at your service. There's a limited amount that can be done after-the-fact but there are steps to consider moving forward and we'd be happy to discuss them with you. What's the best approach to managing passwords to online locations like my bank, my credit card company and all the many online stores I order things from? I wish I had a really good answer for this very common question. In a perfect world, you would have a different user name and password for every place you have an online presence, and all that information would be committed to memory. For most folks though, the number of user names and passwords for accounts they maintain online is far too large to keep in memory. So any "solution" becomes a compromise and you need to consider what works best for you. The single most important thing to consider is that any password you use should be hard for someone else to guess. That means that "password" and "12345" (documented as the most commonly used passwords!) should never be used. The best passwords are a combination of numbers, letters (upper and lower case) and, if the site permits, special characters like "$," "!" and "%." A good password is at least eight characters in length and unique. With those guidelines in mind, many folks come up with a mnemonic aid to remember a password. For example, create a password from a phrase like "home sweet home" as "Home$w33thomE" or "The king of the wild frontier" could be "Tk0TwF!" (using a zero for the letter "oh"). Some folks take another step for multiple passwords by creating a common root password like "Felix" becoming "f3L1x" and attaching a modifier so that it morphs to "f3L1x$1" at one location and "f3L1x$2" at another, etc. Most web browsers will offer to remember website passwords for you and in a desktop computer environment is a pretty secure way to handle them. However you might not want to use that function on a portable device. There is also software available for Macs and PCs that will generate completely random passwords for websites and even remember them for you either in a local repository or an online location. But to be perfectly honest, most folks I know keep a little book of passwords or an assortment of sticky notes in their computer desk. As long as the book or stickies don't get lost or stolen, that's not a bad approach. And some folks even use the same password at every online site they frequent. This is a less ideal approach unless one makes a point of changing that identical password on a frequent basis. Whatever password strategy you decide to employ, be prepared to change a password immediately if you are advised that a website you use has been compromised. Changing a password is usually pretty easy but Terri and I are always at your service to assist you with password creation and maintenance. What do you want to know more about? There are still many other topics we could talk about here or in a personal consultation. We welcome your comments and questions for future issues of the OCW Insider. You also can give one of us a call or shoot an e-mail and we'll set up an appointment to meet with you! |
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phone: 864.710.7009 email: dave@oneclickwonders.com |
phone: 864.633.6707 email: terri@oneclickwonders.com |