I use ICQ a lot for keeping in touch with friends, and it's great at doing just that. However, as anyone who uses it a lot will testify, you quite often get messages from people you don't know. Some people (me included, as long as I'm not too busy) like that, but many people don't, particularly women, who (I'm told) sometimes get some quite disturbing messages from the more unsavoury members of the ICQ community - enough to make some of them want to give up using ICQ altogether. This tutorial is for these people.
I'm using the ICQ 99b software for Windows 95. If you're using a different client some things may be different, but they should be pretty similar if you're using an official Mirabilis clients. For some of the options you may need to put ICQ in Advanced mode if it isn't already - to do this, click "ICQ", "Advanced Features".
In order to send you a message, the sender must be able to find out your ICQ number. There are a limited number of ways this can be done:
- Random Chat
- White pages
- You giving out your number
- Other people giving out your number
- Trying random numbers
We'll cover these in order.
Random chat is easy to turn off. Press the ICQ button, "Find/Add Users", "Random Chat"and make sure that you are not "available for random Chat & Messages".
White pages is the main source of ICQ numbers, since relatively few people have Random Chat switched on (it's off by default). In order to get a number from White Pages, you must give it some information - a name, an email address, an age, a gender, a language, a place or some hobbies/interests. So to prevent yourself "getting found" the trick is to tell ICQ as little about yourself as possible. Press "ICQ", "Add/Change Current User", "View / Change My Details". The obvious ones to remove are your birthday, gender, location, "Info/About" and interests. You might also wish to remove your name if you're particularly paranoid. Remember, lower ICQ numbers are found first and only the first 40 numbers found are shown. Try doing a white pages search on the information that you have put in and see how easy it is to find yourself. Put yourself in the position of a horny teenage boy and think about what sort of infomation he would enter in his search.
The third item is easy to do something about - just only give out your ICQ number to people who you know and trust, don't publish it on your website unless you want the people who read your website to ICQ you.
The fourth item is a bit more difficult. People you like will presumably respect your privacy by not giving out you ICQ number to anyone who asks them for it, but if someone you don't like has got hold of your ICQ number and is posting it on alt.sex newsgroups or something like that, there's not too much you can do about it. If it's one person you're getting messages from you can just add them to your ignore list but if it's dozens it's much more difficult. If the worst comes to the worst, the best thing you can do is get a new ICQ number and start afresh ("ICQ", "Add/Change Current User", "Add Another Registered User").
The fifth method of finding your ICQ number you can do nothing about. However, I imagine it is pretty rarely, if ever, used. There are something like 60 million assigned ICQ numbers, so the chances of you being singled out are pretty rare. Anyone sending messages to huge numbers of ICQ users will get kicked off the network pretty quickly. So if, after taking all the above precautions, you still get unwanted messages, I suggest just adding that user to your ignore list and thinking nothing of it.
Here are another few useful couple of privacy tips. Go to "ICQ", "Preferences & Security", "Security & Privacy":
- Make sure that your authorisation is required for people to add you to their contact lists. Someone who's found you in white pages will almost certainly try the people who don't require authorization first.
- Don't publish your IP address. Although a determined hacker can still get at it, even the most junior of "script kiddiez" know how to use an IP address to find out what internet service provider you use, find out what operating system you are running and sometimes even crash your computer if you are running certain versions of Windows. The security implications are much greater if you are using a static IP address (such as your own computer on a university network) than if you are using a dynamically allocated IP over a modem to your internet service provider.
- Make sure that the "Web aware" option is off - particularly useful if you have some people on your "invisible" list, or are in "privacy mode".
I feel I should add a footnote to say that these precautions are necessary only if you feel that unwanted messages are a problem, and that this problem is caused by a tiny minority of irresponsible users. Most people on ICQ, as in the world in general, are very nice people once you get to know them (even if some days it seems like the nice people are in the minority).
Finally, if you find someone on ICQ white pages and contact them, it's only polite to introduce yourself, say why you're calling and ask if they have time to chat (just like you would do on the telephone). Remember, you might know all about them from their details page, but they will in general know nothing about you.
Tags: howto