Just Being Neighborly

Your neighborhood should be and can be a place of safety. A few minutes of cautious thought can bring decades of peace. Following are a few points of caution to keep in mind:

Unfortunately people who use phrases like, “I’m just keeping an eye on things,” might be data-brokering your kids or trying to fear monger the community using crime apps. Criminals misuse crime-prevention tools intended to protect communities to deflect attention away from their activities. Here are two of the most common ways criminals manipulate crime prevention tools:

• They engage in spamming official-appearing data broker websites, making repeated, tweaked queries to mix up information between individuals, which causes false positive matches.

• They use specialized software to send fake texts, impersonating trusted individuals and

  causing chaos, especially in neighborhoods without in-person neighborhood association meetings.

Suggestions to Protect Yourself

1. Remove yourself from fee-based, data-broker sites.

2. Be cautious about people who do the following:

   • Try to confirm your personal background,

   • Assert knowledge of personal details about you,

   • Offer unsolicited home repairs and maintenance,

   • Offer unsolicited contractor information,

   • Monitor your movements.

3. Sign up for your carrier’s free spam blocker, and learn about text spoofing protection.

4. Know the facts about fee-based background checks: A 2023 preprint study by Lageson and Steward, published in Criminology 2024, suggests that unregulated background checks were inaccurate for false positives 50 percent of the time, and regulated checks (FCRA compliant) were inaccurate 60 percent of the time, most likely due to a financial incentive to over report. (Check back for more on background checks).

5. If online activity escalates to physically volatile behavior, remove yourself from the situation and notify authorities.

About the editor: DeeAnn Bongiovanni writes about policy, pediatrics, privacy, and occasionally she creates a poem—see glowpoet on youtube for poems in progress.