translated from Spanish: “You”: 5 things you should erase from your social networks (and that brought the Netflix series to light)

The second season of “You” recently premiered on Netflix, a series about a man who harasses a young woman in a disturbing way.
From the beginning, You it highlights how the photos, the data, the reflections that we often publish on social networks innocently and without worrying about the consequences, can end up being used against us.
The series, which is based on Caroline Kepnes’ novel of the same name, recounts how bookseller Joe Goldberg tries to fall in love with aspiring writer Guinevere Beck and, among other things, uses the information she shares on social media.
Can they really “hack” your fingerprints using your photos on the internet?
“Joe knows very well that Instagram is a lie, Twitter is pure robots and Facebook a black hole, but he also knows that’s where the interesting things are for him,” he wrote for the newspaper The Guardian expert TV journalist James Donaghy.
He added: “Knowledge is power and every self-revealing gram it draws from those places tilts the scales even more in its favor in its search for Beck.”
But while you should always think twice before posting on networks, there’s information you should be especially careful about. And if you published it, you’d better delete it.
This gesture is not as harmless as it seems. 1. Fingerprints
Posing for a photo making the symbol of peace is common in many parts of the world. But what if that innocent gesture were putting us at risk in the face of the Hackers?
What is sharenting and why you should think twice before sharing your children’s lives on social media
Isao Echizen, a researcher at Japan’s National Institute of Computing (NIII), warns that showing the inside of our index and heart fingers to the camera can make it easier for us to steal our identity.
According to the specialist, new technologies make it easy to enlarge images and graphically scan fingerprints, especially if your fingers are “exposed to strong lighting.”
To demonstrate this, the professor conducted an experiment with photographs in which the subjects showed their fingertips up to three meters away.
Echizen assured BBC Mundo that once scanned, the footprints are “widely available” for indiscriminate reproduction, something “anyone can do.”
According to the expert, it is an increasingly dangerous behavior, due to the rise of biometric measurements to ensure safety on mobile devices such as cell phone.
Post that you’re on vacation, you’re also saying that your house is empty.2. Your holiday destination
Reporting through networks what your holiday destination is going to be has several risks.
On the one hand, you warn potential robbers on the spot, and on the other, you announce that you leave your house empty, at the mercy of thieves.
According to a study published in 2018 in the UK, about 22% of respondents acknowledged that they had been robbed of their homes while on holiday. All participants had posted photos of their days off on social media.
According to technology and social media journalist Ilton Navarro, there are some companies that might not cover you in case of theft if you showed on Facebook or Instagram how happy you were on the beach.
“Some companies consider that somehow you are responsible for the theft for making your absence public,” he said on his blog post. NiltonNavarro.com.
In addition to your holiday destination, you should also not post photos of the boarding pass of the flight you’re getting on.
And it is that you can extract from it the data that you shared with the airline and even the number of the credit card with which you made the purchase.
Your birthday is another piece of data you shouldn’t share.3. Birthday date
“For someone to steal your identity and commit fraud on your behalf, in many countries it’s enough to just have your name, address and date of birth. That simple as that,” he wrote in the British newspaper The Telegraph computer security analyst Amelia Murray.
It’s common to be congratulated on your birthday through social media, and to include the data of how old you are. That makes it easy to figure out when you were born.
“The date of birth is a crucial part of identification, as it is the only data that never changes. And once it’s published online, it’s available forever,” said John Marsden of Equifax.
In addition, as Navarro points out, many use – another habit to change – their birthday as a password, which makes the information they have on social networks and emails vulnerable.
Our personal phone has a lot of intimate information stored.4. The personal phone number
If you think about it, you have a lot of information stored on your personal cell phone: photos, emails, access to most of your social networks.
For that reason, experts point out that posting your personal phone number is opening the door to various threats and that it can put your privacy seriously at risk.
“If you’ve ever used your smartphone to pay for something online, a Hacker An expert could get the credit card information simply by taking the number,” said James Robbins of the Mighty Call virtual security portal.
That’s why experts recommend having a professional number that can be shared.
5. Photos of your children (or children in general)
How much information do you share about your children on social media?
And to what extent do you want to see information about the lives of others’ children on social media?
The sharenting —a term that makes the combination of English words Share (share) and Parenting (parenthood)—is to document the first smiles, words, steps… and each of the anecdotes of the little ones on Facebook, Instagram and other social networks.
However, according to the financial services company Barclays, the sharenting is a gateway to online fraud.
According to the entity, many parents are compromising the future financial security of their children (and their own) by unmeasuredly sharing data of minors on the network.
In fact, the company estimates that by 2030 the sharenting it will cost more than $870 million in online fraud – responsible for two-thirds of phishing over the next decade – and that committing online scams was “never so easy.”

Original source in Spanish