Website Contact: The Balance Between Protecting Yourself and Providing Transparency

byJustAPerson

264 followers

Updated 5 years ago

I was just thinking earlier about this whole contact information thing.

I get it from the perspective of your website visitors being able to easily find your contact information and contact you if they want to.

It Is Important to Protect Yourself Online

But... it goes completely against what a person is advised to do to guard against the growing problem of identity theft. Perhaps this is only happening in the USA. It is a real problem decreasing slightly due to people guarding their personal information more and better fraud detection put in place by banks and credit card companies. Still over 14 million Americans were victims last year.

Identity theft plays out in various forms with the biggest being takeover your accounts and opening new accounts under your name. People have found they have huge debts for things they knew nothing about.

People have filed their income tax looking forward to getting a return only to find out theirs had already been filed and the tax return money already issued to "them".

It is very serious stuff. And a big reason why I am very much for privacy online and to stop companies continually track profiling everyone collecting everything they can, storing it and selling it.

With that in mind... it seems like a bad idea for people to be publishing their full name, address, phone #, etc on their websites.

Of course, if they are using separate addresses (po box, alternate mailing address service) and second phone #s that makes much more sense.

But otherwise the whole practice... I would think it would just result in increasing risk of identify theft at the worst and getting a bunch of mail and phone spam at the best.

I've never understood this idea of putting all of person's personal information on their website when the people (including relevant government agencies) talking about protecting ourselves from identity theft advise to guard this information.

Even entering email online, signing up for whatever, it is advised to use fake or at least a separate email account (separate from whatyou use for official things such as bank, credit card, etc) which many people do that.

Because there are always morons trying to gather this information, sell it, piece it all together for a full profile... gain access to bank accounts, credit cards, etc.

I am curious people who have their phone numbers listed on their site...

Is there not a big increase in spam from that?

It seems odd to me what the need is for it to begin with. When I am looking for information online whether it is on online marketing, laptops, personal development, games, technical information, etc... I have never contacted the site owner... never had any reason to contact any website owner regarding an article I read on their site. Not even sure who or why anyone would do that.

For an actual business site selling a product or service that would make more sense. Actually for an online store it is required I believe. Again makes sense because people buy something there they may want to return it and need contact info to do that.

If someone has a site marketing an mlm or something like that I can see them also wanting to offer contact information because mlm is basically focused on recruting people and to that end the site owner would likely want people to contact them asking for more information.

Anyway...

I am interested in what do we think the best practices would be for this?

Just a simple Contact me form?

Perhaps using some kind of 3rd party CRM / Help Desk Ticket system?

Or maybe every person with a website should register an official business entity with its own address and phone # and list that on the sites?

There needs to be a balance between protecting ourselves and being reachable.