Care enough not to share

Why would you share your private life, interests and misc information about yourself with total strangers? You cannot be 100% sure with whom you share your information with and for what purpose those persons might use that information.

Ask yourself: why is it so important to share everything with everyone?

The criminals gather their puzzle of you piece by piece and use a lot of time collecting all the necessary information in order to execute their scam in a very convincing way.

Some pieces of information may not seem that relevant or important to you, but in the bigger picture –as they say –small rivers lead to an ocean. Meaning, that those small pieces of information lead to a wholeness which can convince anyone.

Something to think about

Sometimes all the criminals need is one missing piece of information and the puzzle is complete. The next step for them is to start executing the scam and the more information of you, the better and convincing the scam will turn out to be.

I've gathered a list of things for you to think about:

1. Don’t accept just anyone as your contact, friend or a follower on social media. Why would you?
2. Living in the era of social media, it is not always necessarily a sign of popularity when you see someone having loads of followers or contacts/friends. These days quantity does not equal quality but on the contrary; in a big batch of apples there are always a few rotten ones.
3. Update your contacts/friends/followers list every now and then; delete those shady, unknown contacts you are not sure of.
4. Check whether there is room for improvement in your privacy settings regardless of the social media platform.
5. If you do not use some of the social media applications on a daily basis and still have your personal information in them available for everyone, consider to delete the whole app.
6. Do a Google search of yourself and see what kind of results you’ll get. The same information is shared with everyone all around the globe. It’s there, online. Always. Unless you decide to do something about it. Want to delete what you see of yourself in the search results? Here's how.

EDIT: this article you can share.