Protect Yourself by Protecting Your Privacy 

It’s probably no news to you that your most personal and private information is available to almost anyone through credit bureaus, marketing databases and now, the Internet.

While the prospect of credit card scams and identification theft are real, they are probably less of a threat to criminals whom you may already be telling where you work, where your kids go to school and where you live.

For a mother and her daughter in Georgia, a job at a check cashing company and a home address combined with deadly consequences. Criminals, knowing she worked for a check cashing store, forced their way into the women’s home, kidnapping both and killing one.

Don’t think that it can’t happen to you. Almost 75% of rape victims are somehow acquainted with the rapist. The rapist might be a friend of a friend, a co-worker of your husband, or someone as innocent-looking as the clerk at the corner video rental store. Perhaps you work at a bank or have a fancy title like Vice President or Managing Director at work. There is some lowlife out there that thinks you have something worth taking.

If you were a bad guy and you wanted to hurt somebody, you’d want to know where they live, where they work, where they keep their valuables and, maybe, even where their kids go to school. (Don’t laugh, the U.S. is in the top 10 countries for kidnappings). The key to keeping your family safe is to deny the enemy the intelligence he (and it is almost always ‘he’) needs.

The following tips are designed to lower your profile:

• Perhaps the most important step you can take is to rent a mailbox and use it exclusively for all your correspondence, subscriptions, bills and packages. Use this address for your checks, on your drivers’ license, on your utility bills, on your warranty registration cards – everything.
• Get an unlisted phone;
• While you’re at it, get the Caller I.D. feature;
• Don’t display your company parking pass on your dash when driving about town;
• Put dark tint on your car windows;
• As proud as you are, refrain from putting those bumper stickers on your car that say, "My Kid is a Superstar at Whipplethorpe Middle School";
• Speaking of bumper stickers, they say quite a bit about you. If you saw one that said "Practice Random Acts of Kindness" you would have a certain impression of the driver. Different for sure from a driver that displayed, "Driver Only Carries $20 in Ammunition". Either extreme is likely to target you. The first one targets you as a victim, the second one as a challenge;
• The same goes for the cute vanity license plates. Forget them, they make you stand out;
• Don’t allow local newspaper, magazine or TV reporters to do profiles on you, your kids, your art collection, or your husband's treasured antique Parker-Hale fowling piece;
• Keep your garage door down and your curtains drawn.

Again, the best thing you can do right now is take your full name and home address off of your checks and your drivers license. Use the mailbox address instead!

Sometimes you might be more valuable than you think. I know of one very unusual kidnapping in the Southwest that targeted a family that owned a print shop. That’s strange you say, but the key to this crime was the family’s print shop owned a very, very sophisticated color copier -- a machine the bad guys felt could further their counterfeiting careers.

So lower your profile and make yourself a hard target for those criminals out there looking for easy pickings.

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