Identity theft

[avevale_intelligencer]

Since I became a regular user of the internet, in order to do what I have done on it, I have supplied my name, address, telephone number, date of birth, card numbers and so on and so forth to approximately fifty squillion people, all of whom swore up and down they were never going to breathe a word of it to anyone else and all of whom could quite easily have been lying through their teeth. If I had not done this, I could not have done what I have done with the internet.

So, as far as I'm concerned, my identity is pretty much lost and gone forever anyway, and there is absolutely no point trying to scare me with stories about the evul commies.

So please, dear internet, lay the frod off. It's done already.

Comments

[keristor.livejournal.com]

This is true. Not only am I in the phone book, so anyone who knows my name and approximate place of abode can find my address and phone number, but for various reasons my address and phone number have appeared on Usenet (and hence on google groups). My date of birth has also appeared in several places. And given my address and name anyone can look up things like my DoB anyway from official sources. And other things banks treat as 'security' questions like my mother's maiden name. OK, my credit card details haven't, but as you say making any transaction with them could have had the details given or sold to anyone. So as far as LJ is concerned, I don't see that they can do any worse with my personal information.

On the other hand, I'm not going to make it easy for criminals by posting them on my LJ posts and profile, just as I don't leave my front door open when I go away for a week. If they want to defraud me they can at least do some work to find the information...

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

But you wouldn't do that anyway, whether LJ was being run from Russia, America, Antarctica or the Moon. It's this thing that now, specifically now that the Russians have taken over, all of a sudden we've somehow got to take it all back or unreveal it or something, or we'll all be targeted by the evil empire. If there's one thing that gets my goat (and there are oh so many, as you probably know) it's being scaremongered about something over which I have no control.

Bottle over here. Genie waaaay the hell over there. And from where I'm sitting (given that I have no personal knowledge of either party in the transaction) it isn't one particle more dangerous now than it was a month ago.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

"it isn't one particle more dangerous now than it was a month ago"

Exactly, and yes you are right that I wouldn't put sensitive information on LJ no matter who was running it. It's amazing what some people will reveal, though, when they think it is "only my friends" (how many people actually know everyone on their LJ 'friends' list?) forgetting about the people who run the thing having full access.

[jahura.livejournal.com]

Regardless of who owns them, according to the annoumcements the servers will stay based in San Francisco, which means that communications and privacy are still subject to state and FCC regulations. We actually have more to fear from our own banks than we do from the Russians.

And as an aside to part of keristor's comment, the mother's maiden name was a security measure that was meant to be "idiot proof" for the nuclear family generation that didn't yet have home computers and so banks would assign passwords to accounts that the customer would easily remember. You don't have to give them that, especially now with all the geneaology trackers out there. Any password will do, and if you so desire you can contact your bank/credit card company and change it at any time.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

The trouble is that most banks don't seem to explain that. At least two of my banking and CC sites explicitly ask for "mother's maiden name". Most people will just go along with that and won't even realise that they can make something up.

(The problem with passwords is that if they are obscure enough to be good security then they are also non-memorable, especially if you need a lot of them. So people then write them down...)

[armb.livejournal.com]

> So people then write them down...

So if someone burgles your house and might have found your piece of paper (or steals your wallet if you need the password with you), then you need to contact your bank and credit card companies - which in that situation you almost certainly need to anyway.
Or you use something like http://www.schneier.com/passsafe.html and remember one hard non-shared password which protects the rest you need.

[jahura.livejournal.com]

No, they don't explain that. I don't think they explain that to accounts officers and are simply told to follow protocol. However, neither have I ever had to explain to any accounts officer how my mother came to be born under the name I just gave. I got the idea a long while back when my mother and my grandparents had accounts at the same banking institution as myself and their names aren't all that common. I was young and paranoid and under the impression that should someone hack into my acoount theirs would be a mere name search away.
One day I lost my purse and had to replace everything, which meant closing the accounts and opening new ones. The rep at the bank didn't even blink when I gave her what to put in there, and I haven't given anyone my mother's maiden name since.

I do think people in general are becoming a bit more savvy when it comes to security, as I have been experiencing with the people I work with. Unfortunately for the banks and financiers it's a case of using the latest technology for antiquated protocols and that's what scares me.