Keeping Your ID Safe - It's Simple

Many people believe that in order to keep your ID safe from activities such as ID theft, you need to go to extreme lengths, and employ highly intelligent techniques. Ultimately, this is not the case, and in actual fact preventing ID theft in the first place is far easier than dealing with it down the track.

Let's take a look at a few techniques which you can use - which are not extreme at all - in order to protect your identity from ID theft. Most of these techniques focus on electronic ID theft, as this is the most prevalent type of ID compromise currently in existence.

Passwords Should Be Difficult

Have you ever wondered why when signing up to a website, they have a little bar on the side of the password field which indicates how "strong" that password is? The reason is that the stronger the password, the less likely someone is to be able to break into your account and steal your details.

Unfortunately, just as many people use their birthday as their credit card pin number, many people use simplistic and easy to remember passwords for online accounts such as their bank accounts, trading accounts, shopping accounts, and e-mail accounts.

By employing a strong password, you can almost certainly prevent your account from being compromised by a hacker. But what is a "strong" password? Take a look:

  • A password which comprises of letters, numbers and symbols.
  • Don't forget that you can use the spacebar key in your password (usually).
  • Don't write your password down - remember it in your head.
  • If asked for a "security question" - choose one which only you would know (very important).
  • Don't use the same password for all of your accounts.

Passwords Should Always Be Different

One of the biggest mistakes that people can make when it comes to choosing passwords to protect their ID is that they use exactly the same code for every website they sign up to.

Consider what would happen if you did become the victim of ID theft - by way of a stolen password. The person who gained access would be able to get into all of the sites that you signed up to, even if they didn't know which ones they were (it's quite easy to guess sometimes).

So, ensuring that all of your passwords are different is yet another way to prevent ID theft.