Don’t Put Your Money In Your Mattress! – Or, reduce your information footprint, so that bad guys are less likely to rob your piggy bank.

For years we’ve all been hearing news stories and commercials that try and drive home the importance of identity protection.  My favorite commercials are the Citibank commercials with someone speaking in a voice that is all too obvious it is not theirs.  You can see a great compilation here at Fight Identity Theft.  I just love this one (with two little old ladies on the couch – with blazing saddles cowboy voices coming out of their cute teetotal ling little mouths):

Wooohoooo Weeewww, Spending Limits, who cares?  Not Use, cause those aren’t our credit cards ….

With all the new technology it’s becoming almost second nature to put yourself on digital display.  Facebook, Twitter, and many more social media sites and apps make it far to easy for folks to put themselves on almost automatic update to tell the world what they are doing ever second of their day.

To show just how potentially dangerous this practice has become the site PleaseRobMe.com has datamine’d twitter accounts to show that real people are giving away their location and essentially saying:

Hey I’m not at home right now, so if you want, this is a perfect time to rob me.

They also show how easily you give away your home location too.

For anyone that has comcast cable at home (you can find it in the on demand movies section), you should check out a great new documentary video called Erasing David.  If you don’t have comcast, no worries.  Here’s a list of locations from Erasing David's website that you can download (like Amazon, etc.): http://erasingdavid.com/category/categories/watch-the-film/

Erasing David is an enlightening movie to show how much of a digital footprint we leave all over the place and how others can use it against us.  In their own words:

Erasing David is a documentary about privacy, surveillance and the database state.

David Bond lives in one of the most intrusive surveillance states in the world. He decides to find out how much private companies and the government know about him by putting himself under surveillance and attempting to disappear a decision that changes his life forever. Leaving his pregnant wife and young child behind, he is tracked across the database state on a chilling journey that forces him to contemplate the meaning of privacy and the loss of it.

That’s right Bond, but not James Bond :- )…

For those that watch Celebrity Apprentice, you’ll notice that in the last few weeks they had to do a challenge to create an advertorial for Lifelock.  This is the commercial membership program that protects your identity.  After a little research and a bit of ringing my memory I remember Clark Howard (of CNN shows of same name), mentioned a DIY way of setting up for yourself what basically amounts to the cornerstone of Lifelock service. Whch is to freeze and thaw your credit accounts.

This freezing of your credit accounts makes it impossible for anyone to open a credit account or otherwise run a credit report on you.  You must be careful and follow all instructions, becuase this also means that you yourself are restricted, unless you ‘thaw’ the credit report for when you are actually on the credit/new account hunt.  Clark Howard put together this great tutorial for how you can do it all online at each of the credit bureaus for a most nominal fee. His instructions are at Clarks Credit Freeze and Thaw Guide.  Here’s clark’s introduction before all the specific instructions:

 Credit freezes are one of the most effective tools against economic ID theft available to consumers. They allow you to seal your credit reports and use a personal identification number (PIN) that only you know and can use to temporarily "thaw" your credit so that legitimate applications for credit and services can be processed. That added layer of security means that thieves can't establish new credit in your name even if they are able to obtain your ID.

Freezes have been available for free to victims of ID theft for some years, but recently all three of the major credit bureaus adopted new rules allowing non-victims to have access to credit freezes as well for a small fee. In addition, most states and Puerto Rico have adopted laws establishing credit freezes for residents of their state.

The cost ranges from $3-$10 per person per bureau to freeze a credit report; a couple of states have higher fees. (For Georgia residents, the cost is $3 per freeze, free for those 65 and over and free for victims of ID Theft with a valid police report).
The cost to "thaw" your reports for one creditor -- or for a specific period of time -- range from being free to $10.

When shouldn't you freeze your credit?
If your credit reports are accessed often for work or because you create new accounts with various financial institutions on a regular basis, it is not suggested that you freeze your accounts. The costs to continually "thaw" your reports would tend to be excessive.

Afterwards you'll find directions and links to assist you in obtaining your credit freeze or thaw from each bureau.  This is quite a savings as compared to Lifelock (who charges $110+ per year for similar service).  The thing about lifelock is that you get a $1million insurance policy and other montioring assistance.  But, until you can afford lifelock on a consistent basis or need it, freezing and thawing on your own should be a definite consideration.