Hello friends!
Trust is a central theme in The Grey Wolf. Who do we trust? And why do we trust them? We meant to publish this post when trust was the theme of the discussion question on The Grey Wolf, but we are a bit behind. For anyone who missed it, the discussion invited us to explore this topic and we thought that we would add to the conversation in a practical way.
We’ve previously shared with you that our priority with our Facebook group was security, after realizing that a scammer had almost taken advantage of one of our members. Now that we’ve moved away from that platform, we don’t expect that the scammers on Facebook will follow us here. However, we’d like to share a few things with you, with the ideas of trust and security in mind.
- Money: We received quite a few messages from members asking to donate to our site. We were very surprised by these messages and sincerely appreciate the thought. But we will never ask you for money.
- Should you ever receive any suspicious emails or other forms of messaging claiming to be from us and asking you for anything, (cash, Bitcoin, the latest LP book, anything), please delete the message and do not tap on anything, (links, PDF downloads, images, etc.). Please make sure you follow this caution with any suspicious messages from anyone.
- Personal information: Susan A. raised an important point about sharing pet names, using aliases and using familiar names for passwords. We agree with Susan. Now that we’re celebrating cat tax here, we highly recommend changing any passwords you may have for any of your other Internet accounts (especially accounts linking to financial institutions) that use your pet’s names, birth dates, significant places or anything else that those viral “fun quizzes” often ask you for. These are often used to obtain information that will lead to accessing personal accounts, like your bank account. The cat tax and potential use of pet names for passwords is one of the main reasons this post was written.
- Name: Some security experts advise shortening your name or using an alias for your online accounts. This is just another step in protecting your privacy and safeguarding against identity theft. On BCF, we’ve asked for your name and an email, please do not share anything that you would not like everyone on the Internet to know. Even with the strictest security settings in the most popular apps, everything can be hacked and accessed. So even here, if you would like to change your profile name to shorten, alter or change it to an alias, just visit your profile settings. If you need help, please just let us know.
- Email address: Some experts also advise creating an extra email address that is not linked to any of your personal accounts (e.g. bank accounts, etc.). You can create a free email address with Google/Gmail or other services and have that account forward any email to your personal account. This way, you will still receive all the emails you’d like, but if there are any security breaches with any particular site, you can easily discard the free email address and create a new one, knowing that your “real” email address is hidden from hackers.
These safety precautions are only suggestions. We admins use a mix of these measures, but not all, so they are definitely not requirements. Of these, the most important to keep in mind is the use of familiar names/dates for passwords. And we wanted to share these thoughts with you to ensure that you knew what to expect, or not expect, with respect to communications from us.
If you have any questions or suggestions on other ways we can help, please don’t ever hesitate to let us know.
Thank you for your thoughts and advice on keeping ourselves secure. We appreciate your thoughtfulness greatly. It is your dedication to the users of this site that make us all feel like we belong to a kind and safe community here.
Thank you, admins, for your advice and, fundamentally, for your work and diligence to provide this site and keep it as secure as possible. I appreciate that doing anything on line is a risk. It is important to me to consider that and decide what level of risk I can tolerate, how a given platform is administered and who I find on it. I find here thoughtful and respectful conversations and an opportunity to hear from more people than I could ever hope to meet. I expect to continue to pay my taxes in any category and appreciate the contributions of everyone here.
We’d like to add that we recognize that some of the suggestions above may already be well understood by everyone here, and don’t mean to represent ourselves as security experts. We just wanted to share some of the ideas we’ve learned, in the event that our friends here might be interested. Some of the ideas here are perhaps akin to cautioning against donating to Nigerian princes. Unfortunately, we saw that that almost did occur in our FB group. We also cautioned against members accepting friend requests from new FB accounts claiming to be LP herself, but we saw hundreds accept those invitations as well. We just thought a PSA could be helpful. We admit to using the names of our dogs and cats as passwords in the past!
Definitely helpful and I eventually figured out who those fake accounts were. Some looked pretty convincing at first.