My Info Guardian and Internet Privacy

As a mom of Tweens, I am concerned about internet privacy, especially as it concerns my children and family’s safety. Most of the time I don’t actively worry about it, but I have spent enough time thinking about it that I do have a few rules I insist my kids follow when they’re online (no chatting, no giving out their location to strangers, no filling out web forms without me present, among others).

But I hadn’t really considered just how much of our personal information is out there in the world until I sat down for lunch with Jessica Gottlieb and the team from MyInfoGuardian.com.

I had the pants scared off me a little bit, I must say.

Turns out it would be ridiculously easy for a phisher to get access to your bank account just from knowing a few details about you, including a too-simple password on the account.

Let this serve as a call to action that, if nothing else, you ought to change ALL your passwords every 90 days. And don’t use your birthdate! Make it at least difficult for anyone else to steal your stuff.

So much of our lives are lived publicly these days, with Facebook and Twitter, and I am a blogger after all, so at some level I have decided to be pretty public with my life. But there’s a limit. And I do not want to go past that limit.

So I am left with knowing there is a lot of information out there about me and I am very uncomfortable about it. I am not a freak about privacy by any stretch, but there are things I don’t want other people knowing. Like how to get into my bank account and make a big withdrawal.

Enter MyInfoGuardian. The service shows you where on the internet your info is being stored and sold, and it can help you get everything hidden and kept, well, private.

At the aforementioned lunch, the team at MyInfoGuardian gave me a lifetime membership in their service, which shows how many websites are holding onto your personal information (think address, social security number, kids’ names) – and how many of them are selling that information  without your knowledge or permission.

Then they make it all better by making them stop.

I’m just getting started using the service so I’ll have more reports as I get into it and as there are more details to share, but in meantime, please change your passwords!