Faith Beidl tries to keep herself safe on the internet. Her facebook account, made private, any information on there, kept limited.
"It's pretty much my name, high school, where I graduated from and that's it really."
The internet is a way to stay in touch, do her schoolwork and pass the time. Endless information, anyone can access. The problem: you don't always know who's accessing yours.
As an example, a survey site that claims to find out your personality asked for a first and last name and email. After the test, before you can get the results, it wants more information, including an address, home and work phone numbers and age. What are they going to do with all that? According to the fine print, and the box clicked in the beginning, you're actually giving permission to share it all with third parties.
"It normally is that's how they make their money they sell the info to a 3rd party and then all of a sudden its advertisers all over but worse than that if it get to the wrong person."
Attorney Arnold Proskin says it's sneaky, but completely legal. What's not is when the wrong person uses it against you. While you may know better than to give out your social security number-the basics i plugged in can still cause harm.
"With that kind of information I can no create my own profile so that if I assume your identity with that information, all the things you given me, there is a way for me to create and identity off of what you've just given me."
New York State Police Senior Investigator William Gray works in the computer crimes unit. He says what you think is anyonomous and harmless can be checked and quickly expanded on with a quick google search. On top of that, anyone can make a website, pretending to be whoever-even a company you think you can trust.
"Drivers license information, date of birth, exact residence, phone numbers , bank account numbers-all of those things can be used against you for financial gain for somebody else," says Gray.
Your best bet: to stick with what you know.
"If someone is soliciting information from you, and you're not looking for them to get the info, thats usually a bad thing," says Gray.
And do some research. After reading through the privacy policy for this site, I found that the owners are a marketing company. The website, uses cookies, internet and pixel tags. While this website's probably safe, another with the same capabilities, may be not. Faith says she's noticed fishy things before, taking quizzes that eventually ask for credit card information.
"I've noticed they're like do this, this and this to continue and then when I'm like ok bye."
Other students tell us they do the same. Not just with survey sites but also downloads, networking sites.
"If it says that its one thing and it comes up something different, I just close the website...you can stuff that is free."
"Anytime someone I don't know is asking me for information, especially on the internet, I think its common sense not to give it out. But if they're doing it in all these subtile ways, I guess they're getting sneakier."
We did try and contact the company that owns the check my personality website.
They never responded.
