You wont need all of that anymore. I have recently come across a website that allows anyone to hunt for personal information at a single click. The website hosts a free to use service which gives information about any person just on the basis of “firstname lastname” and results in presenting a whole load of information containing photographs, email addresses, youtube videos, biographies, books, blogs, news articles, IMs and even social networking profiles including Facebook, myspace, Twitter, Linkedin and many more… The search results are aggregated from a plethora of common and uncommon search engines, social networking sites, blogs, news channels, ecommerce websites, photo album websites such as Flickr and Picasa and hundreds of other websites that you wouldnt have even heard of.

The website is 123people.co.uk. This afternoon, I tried putting in my own name and I was shocked to see quite a lot of my own information being presented on a single page. I would recommend that you search yours and check if your information is being correctly displayed?

If the website shows your accurate information as results, don’t blame your parents and complain about your unique name. The results you see on 123people.co.uk are fruits of your activities that have created information on the web which is now aggregated for anyone to spy on you. If you see too much information being displayed and would like to get rid of it, think about changing privacy settings of websites that are contributing to your information being displayed.

Just to let to know, several web ecologists at WebCoherence are working on finding solutions to these problems of personal identity management on the web. If you are willing to participate and contribute in our solution finding exercise, please write to us at webcoherence [at] gmail [dot] com.

In the meanwhile, please do leave in your comments and suggestions based on your findings and experiences. This will help us in our research.

There you will see when the last login was effectuated, and using which IP address. You can also click on “Details” to see a list of the last logins, their IP address, browser and so on. All you need to do, therefore, is to check if you are really the only person using your Gmail account!

Make sure that you pass on this trick to everyone you know, just everyone. Most common culprits are friends and relatives who might be more interested in keeping track about your activities and the idea of getting caught will keep them away from your Gmail account! Start using all the social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Orkut or Digg to spread the word around – passing the link to this article, telling everyone that you’ll find them out if they tried looking through your Google Mail account.

Best Practice: Avoid checking emails or using other password protected internet applications like Facebook or Orkut when using someone else’s computer. But what if you end up in a situation where you have no choice other than to use such a machine to locate an important piece of information in your mailbox? Here’s a tip. Make sure that you do not type in your password directly, but instead juxtapose a few characters using the mouse pointer.

For example, type the last few characters first, and then change the location of cursor using the mouse, or use the pointer to block previously typed characters and overwrite them, eventually leaving the characters of your password in their correct places – any key-logging software will pick up the wrong and much longer password.  Be Prepared! Practice this technique using your own keyboard! Most key logging scripts do not have the intelligence to manipulate the position of your mouse pointer and hence you password might just remain safe.

Finally, make sure that you change your password immediately you have access to your own personal computer.

There are some very dangerous predators prowling around the web. Take for example advance-fee frauds, also known as the Nigerian scam, or the 419 scam, named after Article 419 of the Nigerian Legal Code. Check it out on the web – just put 419 into Google.

Don’t be too hard on Nigeria. It’s just that they just spotted it first. The fraud also comes from all over the world: Indonesia, Panama, Mali … The vast majority of hardworking Nigerians get very angry at the small number of criminals in their midst.

It starts when you’re asked to help someone smuggle tens of millions of illicit dollars away from an African government, and you’ll be given millions for your trouble! Or you’ve won a Dutch lottery prize worth millions, but there’s an up-front fee, and you must send your bank details. There are huge numbers of variations on this scam.

Before you start thinking no one would fall for this, one sucker from Prague, who had lost everything on a 419 scam, gunned down the Nigerian Ambassador to the Czech Republic.

This scam has given rise to a whole new Internet sport – scam-baiting. The idea is to make contact with the scammers. The game is to scam the scammers into doing all sorts of crazy things on camera. According to the Church of the Painted Breast, it is very rich, but it only gives money to its own members. Scammers are talked into joining the church, where they swear among other things not to listen to rap music, and undergo all sorts of rituals. The Church of Fish and Bread gets converts to pose with a loaf of bread on their head, holding a fish. It’s amazing what people will do when they smell money.

However, I wouldn’t recommend scam baiting to you – we are dealing with some very nasty people here. Don’t go anywhere near them. But be aware, they are stalking you.

From the best practice entries on this blog you may be getting the impression that I am recommending you stop mass e-mailing. Well not quite! There is one situation that I recommend to all my students: using mass e-mails as a defensive weapon in the workplace. The business schools tell you that companies are full of rational people, all with unified aims. Reality check! Many are liars, cheats, fools, incompetents, psychopaths, all with their own agendas. Never take any of their verbal statements at face value, immediately note it down in an e-mail, and send it straight back to them (and others, as witnesses), asking for clarification. Now it’s on the record. Use e-mails to pass the buck – proof that wrongdoing lies elsewhere.

Set up mass mailings and audit trails that cover your back. Always ensure that all commitments or agreements are conditional – practice the art of plausible deniability. The organizational chart doesn’t identify responsibility, only authority. The buck doesn’t stop here – with authority – it stops anywhere you can dump it. The hot potato of responsibility ends up with the poor sap at the end of an audit trail. When blame is flying around, use e-mails to make sure it doesn’t end with you – because believe me, that’s just what the other guy is doing.

Take the scandal of the Shell oil reserves, where senior executives tried to blame one another for misrepresenting the level of reserves. Chairman Sir Phillip Watts blamed the head of exploration, Walter van de Vijver, who in turn produced an e-mail he had sent to Watts in November 2003, saying “I am becoming sick and tired about lying about the extent of our reserves.” E-mail as a smoking gun. Both men bit the dust. But it got worse: the SEC fined Shell $120 million, and the FSA hit them for £17 million.

Once an e-mail is out there, you can never get it back. It’s no good asking IT staff to destroy the evidence. They have more sense than to get sucked into a conspiracy. Destruction of documents be they paper, photographic or electronic is now an admission of guilt – and you can never be sure there isn’t a residue somewhere in the system; however, keep the documents and any litigant has the right to gain legal access. My advice is never put anything in an e-mail that you wouldn’t want the whole world to see; but anything you want the world to see put in an e-mail, and they will see it! 

To avoid spam, ideally users must drop themselves off the mailing lists of any friend or colleague who indulges in forwarding emails to dozens of people collected together in ‘To’ lists. Every time your address is passed around, it opens the door to spammers.

Typical forwarded emails contain pictures, jokes, or e-mails received from others, this is particularly the case between co-workers – the latter risks the whole company e-mail address book getting into the hands of spammers: a fate suffered by many university departments.

You really shouldn’t feel guilty about not forwarding on e-mails, and it is good practice to delete all but critical messages anyway.

However, even though you don’t actively participate in these round-robins, the mere appearance of your address in a list can invite trouble.

Should you need to email a large group of people, then you should use the BCC feature wherever possible, as this prevents spammers getting access to your network of contacts.

It’s also important to delete any propagating list of contacts and email addresses that appear within the body of a received email prior to forwarding it on.

PS: Official emails may be the odd exception in some scenarios, but treat every forwarding decision with care.

If you are planning to start off your own website and need to list your contact email address on the ‘Contact Us’ page of your site, here’s a simple piece of advice.

Ideally you should use techniques listed in Email Best Practice #1. However, should you think that your readers will get confused by using special characters in the listing of your email address, one simple technique is to use picture file of your email address in ‘jpeg’ or another image format. We have listed a couple of samples below.

Most web crawlers don’t have the functionality to perform OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to identify the text of an email address within such an image.

Unfortunately, this technique is only viable provided you are allowed to upload an image, something that not all blogs, websites and fora allow. Nevertheless, be prepared! So whenever you create a new email account, at the same time produce and save a small image using any of the image editing tools available. The images below were created using Microsoft Paint – an application that comes free with every Windows installation.

WebCoherence has concluded from its experiments that leading Email companies including Gmail (owned by Google), Yahoo Mail (owned by Yahoo) and Hotmail (owned by Microsoft) do NOT gratuitously circulate user email addresses to potential marketeers. It is often the users themselves who invite spam into their mailboxes because of their uninformed actions. WebCoherence, therefore, has recognized the need of educating users so that they improve their internet usage in order to attract less spam.

One of the key reasons for receiving spam is because users leave their email addresses on the public world wide web. They list their email addresses on websites, blogs and fora. These public places on the internet are readily accessible by crawler programs searching for live email addresses. Some companies collect email addresses in this way, selling them on to anyone willing to buy – spawning the spam.

If you wish to avoid spam, it is advisable never to leave your email addresses on the public world wide web. Of course there are times when you need to be contacted, and in such situations it is advisable either to leave a free ‘throwaway’ email address that you discard after having received the required reply, or to use the following format:

username [at] domainname [dot] domain extension

for example: John_Doe [at] webcoherence [dot] org

Or you could use other special characters:

John_Doe +@+ webcoherence +dot+ org

John_Doe {at} webcoherence {dot} org

Recipients find these alternative formats easy to understand, whereas most crawlers will overlook them. Consequently you can expect less spam.