For whatever reasons, if you have decided to signup for new a web account or application, be SURE of authencity of that website. We humans always follow some patterns in giving out information, for example using same passwords in multiple sites, passwords matching some identity common to website, name or personal data. A fraudulent sites might collect your password or sensitive data and may able reproduce passwords for your email, bank account, web applications. Technically this is called as “identity theft”.
Before you signup in any website, which may be recommended by your closest friend, do an authenticity cross check. Simple identity checks that would save you from an identity recovery pain.
- Check for website contact address, how do you expect contact-less website to be guenine ?
- Check correctness of the contact information, a guenine website will always a phone/contact number and city/address, You do not need to dial number, but can check whether number is fake or real. Use your intelligence.
- Search for web alert on sick sites. Do a web search with keyword as website name, you can readily distinguish popularity and community respect for website.
- Contact information should also match with Domain registration details, Do a whois/name-service lookup for website name. Note most fraudulent websites keep their “DNS” records secured and locked, if no sufficient information is not displayed on WHOIS lookup, then website has an either weak technical experts or smart spammers. Just avoid these websites.
- If you suspect lot more ? then just step back
Some website has 3 field signup (Name, Email and Password), do not think they do not need more information. Once you login first time, there may page length information you need to fill-in before opening website. The idea behind this short signup is “not to loose chance to miss new guests”.
Alternatively there also exists a open authorizing system in internet called OpenID which can help to protect your authenticating and personal information. Even though openID since 2005, common user acceptance is still low; may be because not every website support this method.
Before any decision, understand yourself, what you are doing. If you are signing up for every requests your friends sending or exploring all websites by signing up or if you are not trusting your Junk/Spam filters without reading them or if you are regular/highly active on more than one social networking websites, then I would easily guess you are culprit of “information influenza”.