Email this page to a friend with a personal messageEver heard of sites like Facebook and MySpace? Who hasn"™t? The problem is that you and your friends are not the only ones who know about social networking sites. There are a lot of different people out there who want to use social networking sites in order to get a hold of your personal information. And they are not getting that personal information for any reason other than bad reasons: they want to take your personal information and either steal your identity or to track you down. Here is a strategy that you can use in order to protect yourself when you are using online social networking sites.
One of the best ways to protect your identity when you are using a social networking site is to make use of a disposable email addresses so that people cannot track down your personal information. Disposable emails are a fantastic way to protect your online privacy. There are tons of people out there who are always coming up with new ways to find out what your identity is and how to get a hold of all of the personal information that is necessary to take advantage of you financially. So what are disposable email addresses exactly, and what can they do for you in order to protect your privacy?
What are disposable email addresses?
The way that disposable email addresses work is that a new email address is set up for every email contact that you have. So then if anybody ever compromises your email address by selling it to a spamming list or selling your email address to anybody else, then you can just get rid of the compromised email address and you only have to send a new email address to one contact, if you decide that you want to maintain any sort of professional or business relationship with the company that compromised your email address.
The best situations in which you should set up a disposable email address is if you are participating in something online that could potentially compromise your security, such as a chat room, online shopping, a discussion group, a file hosting service, or a bulletin board, or even contributing to a wiki. If you sign up for each one using a disposable email address, then no one will be able to track your identity though your email address, and your privacy remains secure and unthreatened. If a web site starts to use your email address in a way that you don't like, such as sending you unsolicited emails, or selling your email address to other companies so that they can send you unsolicited emails, then you can simply delete your disposable email address that is associated with that website, and you don't have to worry about people sending you spam, phishing you, or trying to get a hold of your identity.
How can disposable email addresses protect your privacy?
There are millions of people out there who are eager to invade your privacy and steal your identity. One of the easiest ways to get a hold of your identity is to find out who you are by tracing your email address and then finding out your name, your address, your phone number, and more. By using disposable email addresses, then you can set up a smoke screen between your contact and your real email address, thus effectively setting up a wall between the potential identity thief and your identity. Because you are not using your actual email address, then the identity thieves cannot discover anything about you, and your identity is protected. Also, because you have a different disposable email address for each one of your contacts, then you are also protecting yourself even more because there is not a single email address that you are using in order to contact people.
