September 2009  Be careful with your online passwords In your article about financial scams (Elder Issues, July-August), you advised people to memorize their passwords to protect against identify theft. But who can possibly remember all the passwords most of us have now? And since companies often ask for varying combinations of letters and numbers, you can’t use the same password over and over again. —D.R., Brooklyn, NY A good point, given our many online activities these days. It’s more realistic to keep your list of passwords in a safe place and to change them regularly. Or you might check out programs such as 1Password or Firefox Password Manager to help you remember. There’s also a new online ploy based on passwords that everyone needs to be aware of. It works like this: you receive e-mail that seems to be from someone you know—someone who wants to “show you my pictures” or invite you to be “a friend” on a social network. Then you are asked to “sign in” with your e-mail address and password. But if you do this, you are giving the website “permission” to go through your entire e-mail list and invite everyone on it to be your friend or see your pictures. This practice, called “contact scraping,” allows companies to expand their user populations to attract advertisers or investors. It may violate the federal anti-spamming law, but there’s always a lag time before people learn the new tricks and the law catches up. The Bureau of Consumer Protection’s advice: Do not supply your user name and password from one site (Gmail, AOL, etc.) to a third-party site. Do not use the same user names and passwords for different sites. Or set up a separate account with a different screen name and no address book for third-party use. Be wary also of odd arrivals in your Inbox. If the suspicious e-mail is from a friend, ask if he or she meant to send it.     Front Page Feature | Interchange | Research Review | Elder Issues | Parenting On the Job | We Recommend | A Healthy You | Home

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