Protect Yourself And Your Good Name

Information is a double edge sword. Depending on how information is used, the same piece of information can yield different results under different circumstances. If the information in question pertains to your reputation it can negatively affect you and your life. Information that is been falsely posted about individuals, as well as information you have posted about yourself has been used to keep them from obtaining a job or a new promotion, or from being accepted into an institution of higher learning. Social networks, search engines, blogs and more have made it even more critical that you keep your reputation as clean and spotless as possible. Everything from mistaken identity to identity theft to defamation and personal mistakes have appeared at unfortunate times when you need them the least. By seeking your own information and rectifying the matter you can prevent your reputation from taking a hit.

Search engines can contain quite a bit of information about you. By using Google you can locate a very good amount of data. If that data is less than flattering, you could end up with very little credibility. Anyone from an ex-husband or wife, an angry boyfriend or girlfriend, or a very unhappy former employee can post many things about you without your acknowledgment. Even in a case of mistaken identity or someone with the same name as you can bring great harm to your reputation. By performing a search on your name, address, and phone number you can discover what others see. Also, if you've posted things on your own websites you do not want Google to locate, you can request Google to delete it from their servers. If another individual posted the offending material Google will not remove it. In that case, you will have to send the request to the owner of the site to take the material off the pages.

Another step to take would be to search the Internet for a page that may have been set up deliberately to damage your good name. Even though Google is very powerful and encompassing, there are many profiles and pages Google cannot access, including social networks. In this case search engines that are designed to search for individuals would be a good method to take. These specialized search engines collect data from various websites and combined it together into a profile. It is possible for these people search sites to combine information and data about different individuals and give a search result as a single individual. If you just happen to have the same name as a porn actor or actress, or an elected official who was run out of office, your reputation will be mistaken. If so, once again you can contact the website to have the mistake changed or erased. Online address books also exist that have data about you and not necessarily very accurate data. There are services available that charge a fee to find your particular listings and allow you to delete the offending data. Wikipedia is another webpage that allows anyone to post information. There have been circumstances where false information has been posted about certain people. Be sure to check Wikipedia just in case you have one of those entries.

Even the junk mail left by your mailman works against you. All it takes is an identity thief to fill out one of the many pieces of approved credit card correspondence and change your address to a different one for them to begin posing as you. Remove your name from the many marketing lists as possible and you will delete anywhere between fifty to seventy five percent of the physical junk mail you receive. A free service called ProQuo will assist you in deleting your name from many marketing list including the big hitters such as the Direct Marketing Association and data brokers including Acxiom and ChoicePoint. ProQuo can even alert the credit bureaus TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax to put a halt to selling your data to pre-approved credit card companies and to defeat telemarketers by placing your name on the Federal Trade Commission Do Not Call List.

You can perform your own background check and discover a large amount of information about you that is located in public records as well as information online. This is what employers do when performing a background check on a prospective employee. By ordering a free credit report you can also check to see what type of information the credit bureaus possess, which many times is highly inaccurate. A study performed just under ten years ago discovered one in four credit reports contain errors serious enough to keep you from obtaining credit or employment. Be wary of webpages and sites that dangle free credit reports in order to trick you into signing up for one of their credit monitoring services which charge you a continuous monthly fee.

Of course, sometimes you are your own largest enemy. Those college photos of you and your friends during a weekend party may have been hilarious back then, but not so comical when you are getting ready for the job interview of your lifetime. Over seventy five percent of job recruiters use search engines to locate information about prospective job applicants. There are a number of services that will comb the entire Internet and discover what others are saying about you and remove the offending information. If the service cannot remove the damaging material, it will hide the bad information by posting lots of good information about you and moving the good data higher up in Google and other search engines. One service in particular, called MyReputation, has had very good success in getting rid of offending items from social networks, photo and video sharing sites, and online forums. The co-founder of MyReputation, Owen Tripp, states, “Most customers never ask us to take away anything, they utilize our services as a professional monitoring service.”

CISSP training in the field of information security is a huge benefit to organizations and enterprises. Employees enjoy receiving training from their managers, especially when that training can translate into their personal as well as their professional lives. Everyone should be made aware of the threats against their own personal information. Organizations should always remain mindful that cyber criminals and other hackers are constantly working and creating attacks several times a day. K Alliance training in the area of information security includes environmental security, access control, network security, cryptography, business continuity, telecommunications, disaster recovery, security roles regulations and compliance, and many more topics.

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