Tom’s Tuesday Tech Tip: More Things a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant Shouldn’t Put on Facebook

Passwords are a part of the Internet. Every CLNC^® consultant has to enter a password to use any useful website on the Internet – especially legal nurse consulting research, banking, shopping and social media. Many of those websites have a way of recovering or resetting a lost password.

On some sites it’s simply a mechanism that sends an email with a link to reset your password to whatever email address is on file. On other sites it’s a two-step authentication process that requires you to answer a simple security question such as, “What was the make of your first car?”

Well my CLNC^® amigos, that’s where the trouble begins – with social media. In today’s world too many people disclose too much information in too many places without thinking of the ramifications. You wouldn’t think of putting your passwords on your social media accounts, and we don’t often go around proudly telling people that our first car was a used Yugo. We do disclose on social media sites what high school we went to, where we were born, our pets’ names and the answers to similar questions.

Therein lies the rub. Many of those questions are the same questions you answered for password recovery. A simple glance at Facebook tells me that your high school mascot was the Lemming, you were born in Poughkeepsie and your pet cactus is named Fluffy. It also tells me your email address which potentially allows me to reset your password and takeover your account.

Certified Legal Nurse Consultants can still disclose information on social media sites in order to hook up with those long lost friends from good ole’ Dry Heaves High by answering those same security questions with answers that make sense only to you and wouldn’t easily be guessed by some villain.

That’s why my first car was a Trabant and my first pet was a Dilophosaurus. What about yours?

Keep on techin’,