How private and protected is the information provided by our profile settings?

I'm sure the official policy is pretty good, but what difference does it make?

Companies hire humans. Humans break rules set by their company, and or/make mistakes.

Recently, the Boston Globe newspaper printed all of the records regarding their auto-pay customers (of which I was one) on a roll of newsprint. This included name, home address, phone #, credit card #, expiration date, etc. It was against their policy to do this, but it was done anyway. That was step #1. The printout was ordered to be incinerated.

Then some idiot and/or non-English speaking worker bee (they never explained how this happened) got the paper-to-be-incinerated mixed up with the paper-to-wrap-bundles-for-delivery. This was step #2.

The result? My personal and credit information, along with 40,000 other customers, was physically distributed to hundreds of convenience stores throughout Massachusetts. I had to cancel the card, put a hold on my accounts, blah blah blah.

After my wife bitched to the Globe, what did the Globe do as recompense? A free one-year subscription, and they paid for a credit agency to watch our account. HAHAHAHAH What assholes. They should have given me at least $1000 for the pain in the ass they created. And if I become a victim of identity theft, they should pay millions.

But I digress.

The lesson? If you put it in a computer, consider it public knowledge. If you can't deal with that, don't put it in.

That's funny - sad, but funny. So let me see.... The best thing to do is assume a stolen id and use that as an internet presence thus concealing any possibly true identity from being identified by all the would-be id theives! Throw-away Internet Person. I like it.

If it is on the internet it is not private...simple as that...don't want info 'out there' don't put it on the internet.

Disinformation is the way to go, no-one really knows on the internet who I am, not even the PTB here have the real me in their database.

Don't tell anyone but, i'm really Spiderman, and when i'm not busy giving mary-jane, upside-down-type smoochies,i like to trust rendo' to keep my Peter Parker identity top secret!!! 

in other news, dispite making many webs, and visiting websites, like this one, i find that i still can't actually catch any flies!!

I'm pretty sure rendo' is about as secure as you can get at the moment, but if you are worried about credit card details or something, then why not open a seperate account for your online purchases, that way you will only ever have enough money in that account to cover the cost of the purchase you intended to make online!!

The contents of the "Location" field and the avatar are viewable to all members.
Gender isn't currently shown but possibly might be shown in the future. (You can set this to "unspecified" if you wish.)

All other details are only viewable by staff and are not shared with any other company or mailing lists etc.

Hope this helps :-)

My favourite act of stupidity was a church charity (that shall be nameless). Every morning the office manager recived sale emails from their site, including the 3 digit card security code, print them out and fed the numbers mannually into the credit-card machine.

He'd then take the print-outs rip them in 1/2 and stick them on a spike for use as scrap paper. Which would sit downstairs in the charitys shop.  

Given one of my tasks was to improve system security, pointed out the security hole and was told this was a non-issue as church goers where always trustworthy.  

Then showed the manager how easy it was to use an a proxy and a local vicars debit card for getting to know a few Asian babes :)  Never seen anyone buy a shredder so fast!   

Given one of my tasks was to improve system security, pointed out the security hole and was told this was a non-issue as church goers where always trustworthy. 

:lol:

As a Catholic schoolgirl, I would have found that statement unlikely; as an adult, it's either totally hilarious or sweetly naive, I can't decide which!

Well as a teenager there was a private girls school near us if that answers your question :)