Your e-mail address might be your key to signing up to several sites, from online shopping on Amazon to using your e-mail to log onto your Facebook, yet it is still extremely important to be careful with where you are inputing vital information to. And with that, there are several precautions you can take to think before you type that e-mail or other information there. Always think before you type or click! You never know what could happen.
The main rule of thumb is: If you don't need to put your e-mail, just don't. While it's nice to apply for special offers on stores and comment on forums and other sites, always look first before you type.
You could be saving yourself some potential risk of having your own e-mail address compromised by spam if you try to limit where you are throwing your e-mail at. I'm not talking also about spam from excessive store special offers, but rather dangerous spam that can take your e-mail address over and use it as a main target site to send ridiculous spam to all of the people on your contact list.
Over these past couple of years, these sort of ploys have been used by several scamming advertisement websites that attempt to take over your e-mail address and send out strange e-mail that most of the time sound out of character to your friends and family. The messages usually contain one to two sentences advertising about a "really cool site" with the link over it, yet nowadays with links becoming even shorter and more concealed (bit.ly shorthand), it can become extremely difficult to decode whether the site you are about to click could become potentially your worst nightmare.
Even though most people are probably familiar with the pharmaceutical spam sites, some are still baffled about how they could be preyed upon if every site they visit is considered legitimate or have privacy policies.
The main rule of thumb is that many websites, no matter how safe or legitimate they may be, can always potentially have weak spots where spammers can attack. It's not safe at all to assume that any site is 100% safe and foulproof, and therefore if you can greatly minimize how many sites you are using your e-mail publicly with, it could at least potentially shorten that risk. Try to minimize the amount of subscriptions that you have in regards to sales and stores as well. If you don't frequently shop there, then see if you can remove that subscription...like spring cleaning!
Besides your e-mail, other vital information such as credit card or identifiy information (such as your Social Security number) can be vulnerable to threat, even if you are assuming that it is privately written in an e-mail or in your computer. The issue is that there are several forms of malware or even if your e-mail has been simply compromised (such as with the excessive spam) that can put this information under threat.
Protect your information!
For children and adults alike, keeping your e-mail address on the low down as possible also helps you from being under threat of not those annoying spammers, but overall from anyone who would want to scam or harm you in more dangerous ways. Nowadays with the easier access to information, a dangerous person could have public access to personal information by just knowing a name or e-mail address (as well as other information) that could lead them to know more than you would want them to know. By monitoring your activity on the Internet (what sites you visit) and what information you are putting where, you can also minimize your chances of having someone obtain information that you unknowingly placed in an inconvenient and accessible place. Think of the yellow pages, and how some people simply choose to be unlisted numbers.
Especially in regards of children, parents should encourage them to avoid giving out their names and e-mail addresses, and of course other personal information, when even on game sites such as Neopets or Gaia Online, as they too can be used by predators to prey on young children. Never give out your home address either! Children must avoid at all costs to reveal where they live, or even a hint of a location of where they live, and even with adults, it is best to be as vague as possible to avoid someone from doing a little too much research.
If you are prone to making new, spontaneous friends, always be cautious of when you are giving your e-mail address out to them. Preferrably if you can, give out an alternate e-mail address of sorts that you can use with them to talk before you feel comfortable enough to converse with them in your main e-mail. This is a suggestion for those who would like to make friends, since the Internet is definitely a place to converse and meet new people, but if you're having second thoughts about whether you want to trust that person with your main e-mail or not, this could be a good idea. It is always important to always never completely trust someone from the first impression. And sometimes even from the second, and much like how you get to know people in the real realm, you have to keep caution of who this person is now and who they can really be. The internet is also filled with people trying out a number of different personas, so it is always important to be mindful about that as well.
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