Do You OVER Share Online

Unfortunately, data breaches are with us to stay, at least for the near term. I’d like to think that they will end soon, but I don’t think that is going to happen.

Today web site FlightAware warned that some customers’ information has been ‘exposed’, including social security numbers.

FlightAware claims to be one of the largest aggregators of flight data.

They also seem to be a large collector of your data – socials, names, emails, billing address, shipping address, IP address, social media accounts, telephone numbers, birth year, last four digits of your credit card, information about aircraft owned, industry, title, pilot status and account activity such as flights viewed and comments posted.

WOW!

Also, apparently, passwords. They did not say whether the passwords were encrypted, so assume they were not.

The company claims to have 10 million monthly visitors.

Note that this exposure was self inflicted – as in a configuration error.

Look at all the data that they collected for their users. Likely the ones who lost the most data are the airplane owners who use the site for whatever purpose.

We tend to give websites whatever information that they ask for without much thought.

In exchange, they give us crappy security.

Since we have no way to assess how good or bad a website’s security is, maybe we should just assume it is bad and minimize the data that we share.

Maybe we should rethink what data we are providing and literally refuse to give it up.

Just a thought.

Credit: Tech Crunch

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