Do you have a smart phone? Are you on Twitter and Facebook? If so, the odds of you being a victim of identity theft have most-definitely increased!

We’ve become a society that shares too much of our personal information — and all that voluntary transparency makes us vulnerable to crooks.

Having a trusted financial institution grant, albeit unwillingly, access to your personal information can leave one feeling completely violated and vulnerable.

According to the Rutland Herald, A research group found that an astonishing 36 million people were notified of a data breach in 2011. Those who suffer data breaches are 9.5 times more likely to be victims of identity fraud than are other consumers.

Last year, identity fraud increased 13 percent, affecting more than 11.6 million adults. Using stolen Social Security numbers or credit cards and other financial information, identity thieves buy cars, get cellphones and open new credit card accounts.

People using LinkedIn, Google, Twitter and Facebook had the highest incidence of fraud, the company said. The study found that 68 percent of people with public social-media profiles shared their birthday information (with 45 percent revealing the month, day and year); 63 percent shared the name of their high school; 18 percent shared their phone number; and 12 percent shared the name of their pet.

Do you have only one or two passwords? Are they simple like the names of your children or pet? Thieves know that most people choose a password they won’t forget.

Think about the details of your personal life you’re posting. Are you revealing your likes, dislikes, favorite foods, hobbies? You may think these details are insignificant, but they can be opportunities for people skilled at mining such information to guess your passwords.

Then there’s your smartphone. We are increasingly carrying around some of our most sensitive personal information. The survey found that 7 percent of smartphone users were victims of identity fraud, compared with the 4.9 percent fraud rate among the general population.

By the way, of those consumers aware that their identities had been stolen, 9 percent of the subsequent crimes were committed by someone the victim knew. I mention this because you are probably less careful about leaving your phone lying around when there are people around you that you know.

So what is the answer? It is good to have a handful of passwords that are a little complicated. Use an ! or # or * in your password. You will use it often enough that you will remember it.