Millions of singles turn to Internet dating sites each year in the hopes of finding a mate. I know because I was one of them.
In 2001, on a dare from my brother and sister, I signed up for JDate and went out with one person. Long story short, we’ve been happily married for 10 years and have two beautiful children.
In my brief online dating experience I joined many other hopeful suitors who trust these services with their personally identifiable information, credit card numbers, photos, and even details about their interests and lives. But is that information well-protected by the matchmaking companies? Winning hearts is great, but should you have to lose control over your identity to do it?
Q: Facebook recently announced a new service, Facebook Gifts, that allows users to send Starbucks gift cards, Magnolia Bakery cupcakes, GUND teddy bears and other knickknacks for events like birthdays, job promotions and anniversaries. (The Palo Alto, Calif., social networking giant has plans to add more types of gifts every day.) Are there any risks from a cybercrime or identity theft perspective that new users should be aware of?
Ah to be young, talented and more than a little Type-A. When McKayla Maroney took home a silver medal in the vault, she was not impressed. Her podium pout proved it.
Now her famous scowl has earned her Internet darling status, inspiring the meme “McKayla is not impressed.” The site features Maroney’s smirk photoshopped onto images of famous places and moments in history. Rainbows? McKayla is not impressed. In fact, she’s not impressed with a lot of things, including the Sistine Chapel, NBC and Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
This Olympian has high standards, as she should, and we imagine she would be equally unimpressed with the biggest privacy violators in the 2012 (In)Security Games. Without further ado, here they are:
Identity thieves who have fallen on hard times, take heart. The IRS is here to help.
If you’re counting on that big tax refund to cover the bills and upgrade your gear to steal debit card numbers and hack into computer systems, this is your year.
The IRS may have delivered more than $5 billion in refund checks to you and your compadres who took the initiative to file fraudulent tax returns in 2011, according to Treasury Department investigators.
Keep your nose to the grindstone, and you’ll see a windfall in the next five years, when an estimated $21 billion could head your way, according to The Associated Press.
The latest bill to address the problem of data breaches is just one of an increasingly long line of proposed federal breach notice regulations with little to no chance of becoming law this year.
But with the upcoming election and a partisan fervor that unbelievably has trickled down into data security legislation, it’s unlikely to get voted on this year.
A massive Canadian data breach is making headlines, and it shows how governments and businesses are susceptible to big league data loss.
More than 2 million voter records from the province of Ontario were lost when two USB drives went missing. The drives went missing in April, but the news was made public only this week. In Canada 2 million is a relatively bigger number than in the Lower 48, since the country has 34 million people, while the United States has 311 million.
In case you haven’t heard, Google wants to make life simpler by moving to one companywide privacy policy.
Yes, that’s right. The company that started out as a little search engine has grown into a behemoth that dabbles in everything from social networking to picture sharing to 3D modeling. And it plans to integrate information pulled from all of those Google services you use to learn more about you.
Here are just a few items of what’s up for grabs: your search preferences, contacts, calendar appointments, and habits based on chats.
Identity Theft 911 Chief Privacy Officer Ed Goodman speaks to AM Best about the risk companies face when handling sensitive customer data. He also provides tips for consumers affected by the Zappos breach.
Receiving a breach letter or email doesn’t mean you’ll become a victim. It means something’s happened that could put you at risk. Faced with a breach notice, most people do one of two things—both wrong. They ignore it and throw it away or they freak out and start closing accounts. Do this instead:
1. Read the notice carefully to learn what information may have been exposed and how. (Keep the notice in case you ever need to prove that your data was compromised through no fault of your own.) (more…)
The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision on GPS tracking is a mixed bag for privacy rights.
In a unanimous ruling, the justices required law enforcement officials to obtain a search warrant before they attach a GPS tracking device to a vehicle. A warrantless search would violate the Fourth Amendment.
But the court ducked the larger issue of whether warrants are required for other kinds of surveillance technology, including geolocation tracking in cellphones and RFID tags.
Whether you’re a Facebook user, a privacy wonk, or both, you’re likely aware of the social network’s settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, announced Tuesday.
Under terms of the settlement, Facebook must now get users’ permission before it changes the way their personal information is shared. The social network also agreed to submit to privacy audits every two years for the next 20 years. Read The New York Times’ coverage of the settlement for a more in-depth explanation of the agreement.
Identity Theft 911 is the nation’s premier consultative provider of identity and data risk management, resolution and education services. To learn more, visit www.idt911.com.
