How to make sure your personal information is safe during the account verification process?
Due to rising interest in the crypto world, verifying your identity has become a common practice on most cryptocurrency trading sites nowadays, in order to prevent activities such as money laundering. Especially if you're a newcomer or struggling with daily withdrawal limits you will have to show your real ID card in order to verify your account.
Most of us may use decentralized exchanges in the future, but technology isn't quite there yet. First projects like 0x Protocol or Kyber Network are rarely emerging. The most popular decentralized exchange right now, which is EtherDelta, offer only ERC20 tokens trading (i.e. no BTC, LTC or XMR trading for instance).
More to the point, if you intend to send scans of your ID which contains all of your unique personal data you should first ensure what kind of information is actually required? In most cases, your first/middle/last name will be needed along with the date of your birth and address. It may differ depending on which exchange site you're doing it.
Next step is to simply censor all of your data that you weren't asked for. It may include your photo or signature. Whatever it is - just censor it!
Why? Because in the case when your data has leaked or stolen somehow, you won't be fully vulnerable (if any person is in possession of scans of your ID then he/she can, for example, take a loan on behalf of you).
Another good thing to do is to include a small annotation on scans of your photos that says something like "For the purpose of account verification on [EXCHANGE_NAME]". You can do it using MS Paint or any other graphics editing software. Make sure you don't cover necessary information.
Why even do this? Well, in case of data leakage, if it will come to the judicial procedure it will be clear where does it come from. Other than that, people will get to know about it and won't trust certain exchange again and I believe that motivates them to really tweak security for their customers.
Last but not least, if you really want to make sure you're safe - take care of Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) by removing it. That's the set of metadata in an edited image, that means when you have needed tools you can see what image looked like before it was edited.
You can remove that data using a website like this one or by simply taking a screenshot of your edited document. Then crop it and paste into some graphics software.
And that’s about it. For a quick summary, below you can see a GIF which shows you how it should look like (in this case you were asked only for the full name, date of birth and your permanent stay address):
source of images: Google Images and edited by myself
You should remember that it's important to remain cautious when it comes to sharing your personal data online. Considering the fact that we're living in technologically advanced society, cybersecurity should be important for you.
Other than that, do you gonna verify your account or remain to trade with unverified one with some limitations, or perhaps you wait for the rise of decentralized exchanges?
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