How to safeguard your identity Online.

In this digital age where some people spend more time socializing online than in real life, and with the ever expanding list of every day activities done on the Internet, the amount of information about people stored and sometimes shared out there, can be mind boggling.
One thing is sure: unless you live completely off line and under a rock since the day you were born, it is almost impossible to completely erase your digital tracks.
With the genie already out of the bottle, the one or two things that you can do is to make sure what is out there about you is as accurate as possible and to limit it to only what is in the public domain.
One first step, calls for some pure common sense by limiting the number of sites you sign up for, never sign for site just in the spur of the moment, like when they are claiming to have contests or free give aways.
On the social networking front, try to only sign up with sites that have been around for a while and with a strong commitment to safeguarding users' information. I know that proposition may be a little hard for many people trying to be early adapters. But given the fact that there is something new almost every day, it may be a bad idea to engage in a race trying to be one of the first to try them.
That said, after limiting yourself to a few sites, you should do a good job to keep track of them and be careful about what you reveal in there. And when a site like Facebook starts to play loose with users data, you always have the option to take down your data and delete your account because after all, that data belongs to users even though from time to time, Facebook acts as if it had forgotten about that.
Another tool in users' arsenal, is Google Dashboard which gives them the means to edit or remove--information about users that various Google sites and services may be storing.
Others information repository places in the Web like WhitePages.com, also allow you to edit or sometimes remove some information about yourself.
And who can forget about Twitter? With the micro blogging site experiencing a phenomenal growth and people eager to share almost any thing instantaneously, there are a lot of room for regrets later. To deal with embarrassing tweets, the service offers its users a way to remove them, but that can be done only one at a time. So, if you are tweets prolific with a bunch of those, until recently, your options may have been limited to just close the account and open another one even though the old offending tweets, would be still out there. But now, there is another option offered by a third party service called TweetWipe, at TweetWipe.com to get rid of them all at once.


For more, see pcworld.com