Wedding Registries – What you need to know before you begin
We’re fast approaching wedding season, and wedding registry sites are humming with action. These wedding sites have advanced far past the simple registry of gifts of old; they now typically include blogs where brides, grooms, families and friends can share in the excitement and plans.
Online registries provide a wonderful avenue for celebrating, but for a safer experience think through and apply a few key safety principles before posting. Understand that it won’t just be friends and family that view your site; criminals glean a tremendous amount of information from registries unless they are set to private.
It doesn’t take a cyber-genius to exploit people. Clever tracking of information on bridal and baby registries, obituary and shared memorial sites, publicly viewable social networking sites, and photo sharing sites can yield vast amounts of personal information.
Click here to see a TV segment I did with King 5 News on bridal registries.
Criminals collect information from registries
Note I’ve used Macy’s bridal registry as the example because it exposes wedding parties to a particularly high level of risk, but the problems illustrated apply to many of the popular wedding sites.
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It begins with a search – you don’t have to know a name, just enter any letter in the first name field, and any 2 in the last name field. In this example “c” and “an” brought back several hundred results. You can narrow the search by adding a few more likely letters, or selecting the year. Criminals who want to steal wedding gifts, will be looking for upcoming weddings, criminals who want to steal identities may well look at past years. |
Once the criminal pulls back a long list of names they can sort the list by state, date, registry, or whether the couple has a blog. This allows the selection of potential victims by criteria – for example only those nearby, with a wedding coming up and a blog that gives extra information. But even simply grabbing the names and location make most couples locatable.
Once a couple has been targeted, the blog provides a wealth of exploitable information. What they look like, how they met, who’s in their family, where they work, where gifts will be sent to…
Event details tell a lot about the socio-economic status of the couple (or their parents). In this case the wedding will be held in a very exclusive neighborhood (which also indicates where at least one set of parents lives), and a reception at the Seattle Space Needle is not going economy. Also shown are the exact times that people will be away attending the wedding.
It’s not just the bride and groom who get exposed. Wedding blogs frequently ‘honor’ everyone in the wedding party and in doing so provide information that exposes them – to having their home robbed while at the wedding, identity theft, and so on. An additional tab provides information on where the guests will be staying.
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Then there is the gift registry itself. This is literally a shopping catalog for criminals. They can see what you’ve requested, what the value is, and what has been purchased. It means they can know in advance if the items are ones they want to steal, and even have re-sold them before stealing them. |
Several additional pages that couples frequently use include the guest book which is full of information about the couple and their friends; the honeymoon page where many list their full honeymoon itinerary; and the wedding photos pages (with everyone in the photos identified in the text below) that get filled after the event.
Information shared on wedding sites can be used to find even more information
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A simple white pages search on any wedding participant brings back an address and phone number; with an address a criminal can leverage government records to learn if they own their home, vote, have criminal records, etc. Searching popular social networking sites for the names of people in the wedding party often provides even more information. Though the bride set her site to private, we still learn her age and location. |
The potential risk does not mean you shouldn’t have wedding blogs or use wedding registries
These tools allow people to share their thoughts and feelings over time. They create a collaborative virtual memory book that can be revisited over and over to recall happy moments, reread the stories of others, or remember those we’ve since lost. Just do so cautiously.
What you can do to stay safer
Think about what information you are really sharing, and with whom you feel comfortable sharing it - because if it isn’t password protected other people will be looking. Although site policies vary, I didn’t find reasonable safety advice on any wedding registry to help you use them more cautiously. To compensate for this lack of information, I suggest the following:
- Always read the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policies before you give any information.
- Learn whether the Web site allows you to make some (or all) information private. If you can’t set your site to private, be very cautious about what you share.
- Review the information fields and a few sample pages to see what material is typically displayed. Look for risks that others may have inadvertently exposed themselves to.
- Only complete required fields; leave others blank. Unfortunately most sites require the bride and groom’s first and last name, city and state, and the wedding date. If this is more than you want to share, then consider a different registry site which requires fewer pieces of personally identifiable information. Or don’t use the blog functionality
- Never post information online about anyone else without their consent. Check with partners, parents, friends and other relatives before posting any information about them on the registry.
- Ask a friend to review your registry site for potential risks. When you’re caught up with joy and wedding preparations, safety may not be at the top of your mind.
- Call the service shortly after the wedding and request that your registry be removed. Most sites keep information visible years after the wedding. A wedding is a hectic time, so make a note on your calendar to close the registry listing. Unfortunately, you have to call the hosting site because none of the registry sites let you do this online.
- Contact the wedding registry site you want to use and express your safety concerns. Highlight required fields that you feel should be optional and specify the missing safety features like restricted access passwords and useful safety tips.
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- Avoid these hassles - create a private blog on a blogging site – you can replicate all the pages wedding sites offer, or create your own. Add everyone invited to the wedding and give them permission to view and comment. On the actual bridal registry site – if you choose to use it for the gift registry - place a link to your private blog and a set of instructions telling visitors to click on the link. Add text that if they have trouble, to contact you via email (create a separate account don’t expose your personal account). This way you can manage who sees your wedding blog and share information freely while staying considerably safer.
