Please Stop Posting Pictures Of Your Debit/Credit Card on Twitter

Apparently "thinking before you post" is not a practice used by all, as people have found the need to take pictures of their new debit/credit card and post them on Twitter for all to see.

And just like people setup websites to stress how important it is to watch what you say on Facebook, someone has taken the liberty of creating a Twitter account dedicated to retweeting  tweets that mention a credit/debit card and include a picture.

As of this writing, @NeedADebitCard features 34 re-tweets and hails a good 6,000+ followers. There’s no telling how many soon-to-be identity thieves lurk within that number, but there’s a good chance they’re in there somewhere.

But, really, cyber thieves aside: what is the deal here, people? Why do you feel so compelled to take a picture of your credit/debit card and post it online for the world to see?

If there’s anything that should have been taken from the lesson that 35-year old Christopher Chaney taught us when he hacked into the email accounts of a string of celebrities, including Scarlett Johansson, Christina Aguilera, Mila Kunis and others, is that we need to be very careful about what information we share online.

After all, it was the social network profiles of said celebrities that allowed Chaney to correctly guess the security questions to their email accounts and help himself to all of the risqué information stored within them.

Given the fact that you’re sharing photos of your debit/credit card, I’d say it’s safe to assume that you’re exposing more than enough information to have the exact same thing happen to you.

According to the WSJ, 12 million Americans were hit with identity fraud in 2011. That’s a 13% jump from the previous year, and it’s all thanks to our growing use of social networking sites (*coughthatwesharetoomuchinformationoncough*), smartphones and an increase in security breaches.

So it's important that you be careful of what information you share online. You never know who’s sitting on the other side of the computer screen reading your tweets or posts.

With that, I will leave this topic by re-iterating @NeedADebitCard's request that you “please quit posting pictures of your debit cards, people.”

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