What is digital identity theft and how to protect your data on the Internet

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

The more data about you on the Internet, the higher the risk of losing not only it, but also your digital identity.

Does anyone collect data about me on the Internet?

Yes, and practically any. Information about users (photo, name, date of birth, address of residence, phone number) is collected today by most Internet services. It is from this information that your digital portrait is formed.

Detailed data about you, your interests and preferences is collected by social networks and search engines. In addition, special trackers that monitor your web surfing history are built into the sites of many mail services, stores, and applications. In general, if you are an active Internet user, you will not be able to hide from this.

What's bad about it?

Such information may be collected for marketing purposes. Companies are ready to pay big money for a portrait of their clients in order to sell their services more efficiently. The more detailed this portrait is, the more expensive it is.

Such data trading may be unpleasant, but it is not against the law. It is most often used by insurance companies or banks to see if they will face loan defaults or high health insurance costs.

It is much more dangerous if this information falls into the hands of scammers. For example, they can steal it or buy it on one of the underground forums. Unfortunately, mass leaks of user data occur fairly regularly today. Moreover, not only small online stores are not immune from this, but also such giants as Yahoo! or Facebook. The latest in a series of incidents was the leak of data on plastic cards of customers of the largest airline Delta and the retailer Sears.

What exactly can happen?

There are many known ways to maliciously use personal data. For example, spammers and phishers can use your first and last name when sending messages. As the sad experience shows, personalized mailings, in which attackers refer to the victim by name, work much more efficiently than mass and impersonal ones.

It happens that criminals also hunt for a specific person. For spear phishing to work, they need to get as much information about the user as possible. For example, whether he is selling a car now, traveling abroad, whether he recently visited a certain restaurant - all this can be used to compose an extremely plausible fraudulent message so that the victim will definitely fall on the hook.

What about digital identity theft and biometric data leakage?

Theft of the user's digital identity as a whole is gaining more and more threatening momentum. By itself, this phenomenon is not new. Fake pages on social networks appeared at the same time as the social networks themselves. Using the victim's data, attackers can create a fake page and write obscenities on its behalf, register on dubious resources.

However, today this threat has received a new development.

Even without special knowledge, you can now edit a video of not the most pleasant content, where you or your friends will play the main roles.

If, of course, you have at least a dozen or two photos on the Internet. Most probably have it.

The recent story with Deepfakes is just the beginning. Over time, these technologies will only improve. If today a fake video with celebrities can be distinguished from a real one, then in the near future we may well expect real “masterpieces” that can be recognized only with the help of special technologies. The same applies to voice data: today there are commercial solutions for imitating someone else's voice.

A separate risk that is becoming more and more real is biometric data leakage. Face, voice or fingerprints may become a universal means of authorization in the near future. Recently, three major social networks operating in Russia have launched their face recognition systems. Theft of biometric data opens up really great opportunities for fraudsters. At the same time, you cannot change your face or fingers, unlike a password.

How do I protect my data?

Don't share too much information

Especially in open areas. Although there have been cases when photographs of people leaked from closed publications. Anything you do on the Web leaves a digital footprint. In many cases, nothing can be done about it without resorting to a radical rejection of technology. But it can be controlled to a certain extent.

Update your social privacy settings

Limit the access of strangers to information that you would not want to see in the wrong hands. On some sites, just one or two checkboxes are enough. Flexible settings suggest that different parameters can be set even for different photo albums. Therefore, be careful.

If you find your data somewhere, don't panic

If this is not a dead resource, you can always contact the administration and ask to delete it. As a rule, in most cases this happens quite quickly.

Limit apps' access to personal information

Your data can get into the databases, even if you use a push-button telephone, and go to the Internet only on holidays. Remember GetContact? Some applications get access to the contact list when installed. Thus, a careless user leaks not only his data, but also the contacts of all friends. You can fight this too. Facebook, for example, has a special setting that allows you to choose which information is open to applications in such cases.

Pay attention to all links you follow

Data collectors can wait in unexpected places. For example, in popular tests like "What fruit are you?" or "Who would you be in Victorian England?" We don't want to upset anyone, but often the main purpose of such tests is not to help users get to know themselves better, but to resell your digital portrait to marketers or scammers. The recent story with Cambridge Analytica is a prime example. Before giving applications access to a profile, consider whether you need it.

Protect your biometric data

Very often they are collected without your knowledge and not only on the Internet. For example, one of the sources of information is surveillance cameras. But some measures can still be taken. In the same Facebook, face recognition can be turned off altogether. At least until you are sure that this data is stored safely. In addition, in social networks, you can remove the corresponding marks from the photos on which you are tagged.

The less data about you on the Internet, the less the risk of losing your digital identity.

When interacting with modern online technologies, it is better to double-check everything a hundred times than then fight off spammers or look for your own clones on the Internet.