Prevent your data from being scraped

Other than canceling all your social-networking accounts, what can you do to protect yourself against list scrapers?

First, be diligent about your own sign-in habits. Use strong passwords and enter them only on sites you trust. Also, make sure you have your browser's phishing protection turned on. The LinkExtend Firefox extension recommended by WS senior editor Gizmo Richards in his Mar. 5 Best Software column (paid content) will alert you to most malicious site operators.

Second, safeguard your e-mail accounts. As emphasized earlier, the main danger is not that you will give away your own information but that your so-called friends will do it for you. Use your work e-mail address only for communicating with colleagues and clients, not for shopping or registering on social sites. Most importantly, don't share your work address with friends and relatives.

Next, educate your contacts that you don't want them handing over their e-mail files or contact lists to any site that asks. You can't guarantee that everyone you know will comply, but there's no reason to let scraping services go unchallenged.

Finally, protect your primary personal e-mail address by using disposable aliases that are forwarded to your primary account. That way, you can track who is sharing your address and delete any addresses that become spam magnets. Google's Gmail and Yahoo Mail both make it easy to create throwaway e-mail addresses. (They work quite differently, however, as WS contributing editor Scott Dunn explained in his July 24, 2008, review of webmail services.)

The data-scraping problem will not go away any time soon, but taking steps to safeguard your personal data can help you keep the scrapers at bay.

(Forward from Windows Secret)

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