Criminals isolate, target, and research individuals based on this information. This includes everything from simple identity theft to murder. You may also recal

Criminals isolate, target, and research individuals based on this information. This includes everything from simple identity theft to murder. You may also recall numerous yahoo email address "hacks" based off easily locatable answers to security questions of public figures. There are some basic lessons here that are applicable to anyone using the internet, even just for casual reasons. That includes your parents or grandparents. What do you think the chances are that they would be able to proactively defend themselves against someone tearing apart their private lives based on information they didn't even know was public? -Not sharing/linking email addresses an alias How is this relevant? This could be as basic as not wanting to link your persona as a member of the town council to your postings in a World of Warcraft forum. Even if your life is mundane and none of your hobbies are embarrassing this is still important. Forum posts, which most users treat as casual chat, along with many social media interactions are permanent, public, and searchable. There is no compelling reason to allow anyone in the world to know an enormous amount of personal details about you. At least on your Facebook page, if Zuckerburg hasn't recently screwed with your privacy settings, you are narrowing the number of people who can look at these things. I'm not going to endorse any particular services, but many sites allow you to search accounts by email address. Amazon, in particular, can reveal your public wishlist based on email address (rossulbricht@gmail.com shows an account but not a wishlist.) You can figure out a lot about a person from their wishlist + reviews. Quite frankly I think this all is very relevant and mass marketable to anyone building tools and products to firewall personal information.