LostCousins Newsletter 8 April 2013- Security

Google continuously crawls the internet and indexes everything it finds. As you can appreciate, the internet is vast and indexing this vastness takes time. At some point, it will get back round to the page you have just updated and update its indexes with the new (missing) information. So basically, you now need to wait until this happens.

I have simplified this whole process purely in the interests of making it more understandable.

The 2nd link is going to be more troublesome. Instead of trying to follow the link can you remember the home page of the site, and update your records there? If the site no longer exists then maybe approach Google?

 

Does it matter? If people can associate your email address with your physical address or your bank account, perhaps it does. But otherwise? If I search on the email addresses I use or have used on Rootsweb mailing lists I get heaps of hits. For other email addresses I use, including the one I have on Facebook, I get no hits.
There seems to be two major results from your email address being visible on the internet.
1) people can contact you more easily; 2) you are likely to get more spam - but you're going to get spam anyway if you have correspondence with anyone who isn't careful about keeping their computers free of malware.

 

The danger of publishing your email address is that it identifies you very precisely. As Carla has pointed out, there are likely to be lots of people with the same name - but there will only be one with your email address.

On its own an email address doesn't do much harm, but combine it with other information and it could be fatal. For example, when I'm trying to track down a member whose email address is out of date I'll often find their postal address by searching for their email address - it might be in the minutes of a PTA, a tennis club, or a residents' committee.

If you think about it, LostCousins works the same way - there are lots of John Smiths aged 32 but there's generally only one on a given page of the census, and that's why we use the census references.

 

Unless you are someone who has a particular reason for keeping your whereabouts secret, your address is in the telephone directories. Even if you have a silent phone number as I do, you can be found through electoral rolls.

Only this morning I found the village where a distant cousin lives through a simple Google search which showed her on recent electoral rolls and gave who is listed at the same address. She lives in Shropshire. I was able to do this as I could track her marriage in the GRO indexes - and found I hadn't been able to find her when I looked for her address some years ago as my aunt had given me the wrong spelling for her husband. The GRO indexes in full weren't available then. With the GRO indexes I can trace people in England down to their children born 21st century with a fair degree of certainty unless they have common names and so identify many people in Ancestry trees marked Private. You can't do that quite so easily in Australia where BDM indexes have a much longer privacy period but if the information was put in a newspaper it's increasingly easy to find.

We can worry about the information being available but that's not going to stop it being there.

 

Around half of telephone numbers are unlisted, and a similar proportion of voters have chosen to be excluded from the published electoral register. I spend a lot of time trying to track down LostCousins members who have forgotten to update their email address so I see both sides of the coin - the ones who can't be found because they are careful, and the ones who can be found easily because they are less discreet.

The last electoral register that was complete was 2002. You can search this year at findmypast, but there's a significant chance that the person you're looking for has moved, died, or emigrated in the intervening decade.

It's also difficult to identify the right person in the Electoral Registers unless the name is unusual or you know the names of other people of voting age in the same household. So innocently posting the name of your spouse on a forum might be the clue that enables someone to track you down.

 

The problem comes when you post information first and worry about it later - as happened to that girl in Kent:

Kent youth PCC resigns after Twitter row

 

Hi Carla,

I followed the dead link. It came up with the name www.terryaspinall.net/suffolk-surname-list/suff_c_ch.html
So I put the 1st bit www.terryaspinall.net into google, just in case they've changed their file structures.
Google suggested I might mean
http://www.terryaspinall.com/ and that link seems to work.

I don't know if this is the "new" site for what you had, but if it is there is a contact available.

 

That's not inevitable. Well over 90,000 people have registered at LostCousins over the past 9 years, yet I currently get only 10 spam emails a week (on average) if you exclude those from people whose email accounts have been hacked.

 

The full electoral register is now a rolling register that is updated monthly, a decent chunk of it is now hidden from the general public but the full register is available for various purposes. eg: all political parties registered with the Electoral Commission in the UK under the Political Parties and Referendums Act 2000, are entitled to copies of the full unabridged register in electronic format. This is also available to anyone who stands for public office for the area for which they are standing and again its the full unabridged version of the current register.

 

It's strange for me to be in this discussion on the "don't be so concerned" side as I'm usually advising people on computer security. I'm simply saying that people having access to your name and/or email address is not a big deal.

On the other hand I'm very careful what information I give out online. I'm a hopeless Facebook user as I rarely post yet I could tell you what some of my friends have had for breakfast and where they had it For me it is far too much information.

I only fill compulsory sections on forms and even then if I think they don't need to know I don't put a real value - especially for phone numbers.

I use strong passwords for most sites and different passwords for every site. I use a Password Manager and my Master Password is also strong. Does that mean I can't be hacked - no because all passwords can be broken with enough effort I understand - but it's far less likely.

My computer has never been infected with malware. Is it possible? of course it is. However my husband would kill me I think. He's a computer tech and makes part of his money by cleaning computers of malware - and of course if they're badly infected, this means wiping the drive and reinstalling everything.

However, there are other ways for the technically savvy to know where you are. Most of us, I suspect, don't hide our IP address for example. The internet is a communication medium. You can't communicate if people or sites can't find you.

What am I wanting to protect? My financial details and my physical safety. Are either 100% safe? Of course not. We live in the world.

 

Contact me directly if you want to change your name; when I change it all of your messages will be altered but if someone has quoted one of your messages it will still show your old name (perhaps the moderators can help you out by editing the quotes?).

The instructions on the registration page were changed over the weekend and now read:

The name you choose will be shown alongside your messages - once set, this cannot be changed. You are advised NOT to use your full name or a name you already use at other sites as this could be a security risk (since messages are indexed by Google), but it may help to include your first name, eg TomR, JulieK, James6

Of course, simply publishing your name on the Internet isn't risky - it's the other information you reveal that creates the risk.