I just had this thought recently.

I remember I avoided add friends that aren’t really friends on my Steam account so I had like 3-4 friends at max. Then I realized these 3-4 friends had some good details about my life, after all, as I said, I avoided add any person, and those are closer people to me.

Then occurred to me how easy would be for someone to get extra info about myself, add me on Steam or one of these friends, and manipulate them to get more info about me.

But then I realized, what if I had 40-50 friends? It’d be harder, my real 3-4 friends would be hidden between other 40, so it becomes hard to someone with bad intentions use social engineering to reach me.

After that I started adding dozens of random people on my online accounts.

This made me realize that sometimes, burning info about yourself is better than trying to secure them.

I think this is applicable to any platform where you connect to people in a certain way.

I know this might sound kind of paranoiac but that’s how social engineering work, and it’s not new. How many cases have we seen of internet destroying real life people?!

  • Willoughby@piefed.worldEnglish
    0·
    11 hours ago

    Yeah he’s mid thirties, has a cat, and mostly plays roguelikes and soulslike games.

    really narrowing the field, aren’t we?

    • Willoughby@piefed.worldEnglish
      0·
      11 hours ago

      The guy with the GOS Pixel 8 is the most secure guy in the room. He’s also being frisked in the corner and being driven to a 2nd location.

  • mrnobody@reddthat.com
    0·
    12 hours ago

    I’d like you to meet my wife so I sound more sane in comparison lol.

    Jokes aside, why would these random people target you, unless you’ve revealed some interesting details about wealth or inheritance or something? I mean yeah they could randomly target you, but odds are of those 3-4 guys 1 ends up coming after you?? Not likely.

    Doesn’t hurt to obscure your info, but I think you’d be fine in the long run.

    Personally I don’t know anyone whose life was destroyed by some guy in the internet tricking them. Maybe a few older people falling for gifting a few hundred bucks but that’s it. Maybe a cryptolocker too, but again, less of a big deal.