How To Give Away Your Personal Information

Identity Theft and Your Personal Information
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Identity theft is apparently the "in thing" these days. By media accounts, hackers and evildoers lurk everywhere trying to steal your personal information. In the past few months, one company after another is being forced to admit customer data has been lost or stolen.

In many cases, they have then come forth repeatedly over the next few weeks, or even months revising the estimated number of impacted customers. To date, I don't think any have ever lowered those numbers.

Identity Theft and Respected Companies
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Generally speaking, these aren't fly-by-night organizations. These are respected companies who we've come to trust. In many instances, the loss wasn't even the work of a "malicious hacker" or other mystical force beyond their control; it was simple carelessness. The frequency of such reports of identity theft is making it difficult for consumers to feel confident in those with whom we do Business. Customers are outraged that companies are not doing more to protect their information from the forces of evil.

You and Your Personal Information
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What about you? How are you at keeping you personal information under wraps? Some of these high profile incidents were the result of a trivial mistake that could have happened to anyone, including you.

Let's consider two events that didn't make the front page of C|Net or cnn.

The Keys To The Castle
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I consult for a client who doesn't trust me. It's nothing personal, they don't trust anyone. Whenever I visit this site, I am forced to contact the client throughout the visit to have them type a credential, or password, to grant access to a server or router. It's really annoying.

I really respect this client.

They don't really know me; I'm "the consultant". They're taking the proper steps when dealing with a consultant, providing the absolute minimum amount of information required. They would never give me unsupervised access to the network, and certainly wouldn't consider giving me passwords to their servers or routers. Not on purpose anyway.

Then there was the day I was working alongside the client and needed to reconfigure a router to complete a task. It's a long walk to the client's office to get the password for that particular router. Yes, this is a client who apparently has a unique password for every piece of equipment they own. Conveniently the client does keep a password protected file on a USB key that contained the needed information. The client was completely appropriate and even asked permission before using my laptop to fetch the file. I consented, and even made the gesture of turning away while he unlocked the file and retrieved the required password.

Have you ever used Google Desktop Search? It's a very cool, and aptly named, program that is a Google for your PC. It will index your files and make them searchable through a fast, flexible, and easy to use interface. It'll even cache the contents of files so if you move it off your hard drive, you'll still be able to see the contents of what was once there. Normally it does all this in the background when you computer is sitting idle. It also does it anytime you open a file.

Your Personal Information Is The Prize
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You guessed it. Logins, passwords, public and private IP addresses. You name it, I had it. The client who would never give me a single password had turned over all of them at once.

What kind of wondrous data was now available? Personnel records, salary data, trade secrets? Maybe, if this was a corporate client. What about an academic, a University even? Student records, financial aid forms, and grant information. The possibilities were endless.

I promptly deleted the cache. The customer didn't want me to have the information, nor did I.

Would You Hand Your Credit Card To A Stranger?
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The previous example showed how simple it is to inadvertently reveal a large amount of data. It's funny how easily a person can dismiss this type of loss. After all, it's not your data, right?

So let's get a bit more personal.

Convenience And