By Simon Moores, 8 April 2008 17:29
COMMENT
Identity theft is rife. Perhaps it's time individuals took a leaf out of business's book and adopted a personal information policy that will make life harder for criminals, says Simon Moores.
I understand beards are back. That news may well find favour beyond the present generation of Linux programmers and the traditional Information Taliban. But it will take a lot more than a little facial hair, a baseball cap or a hoodie to conceal one's identity from today's intrusive society.
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There are already signs that spreading every minor detail about one's personal life across the internet may be on the wane as a lifestyle choice, at least among the over-25s.
With identity theft now rife and rising steadily, keeping one's online personal information to an absolute minimum looks increasingly important.
Large businesses use services to monitor corporate reputation. A need may now exist for a similar model for individuals, to measure personal reputation and exposure on the internet and also link into credit ratings.
At last month's e-Crime Congress in London we heard how criminals are becoming increasingly sophisticated in targeting individuals in the lucrative game of identity theft.
Criminals can call on directed phishing attacks using the simple expedients of ransacking rubbish bags and using Google to look for useful information on social networking sites and generally sprayed across the internet.
According to the Directgov website, "Identity theft affects more than 100,000 people every year" and victims are invariably ordinary people who are less likely to be aware the theft has happened or take swift action to deal with the problem until it's far too late.
Identity theft has become astonishingly easy for criminals. I recently met an individual who had experienced the unfortunate consequences. He was an electrician whose life had been shattered by an experience that involved a criminal cloning his identity to commit a number of frauds.
The first he knew of it was a summons to court in Birmingham - he lived in London. What followed was a tortuously unsympathetic process that involved trying to prove that he had not committed a series of criminal offences in the Midlands.
If you have ever attempted to report an internet-related crime at your local police station, you can imagine how the civilian assistant - it's unlikely you'll see a police officer - will react to your claiming from behind a reinforced window that you are not actually the serial offender whose criminal record is in your name.
The Bebo-obsessed young are naturally profligate with their personal information because at the age of 16 or less, one has little or nothing of real worth to risk in the broader world that exists outside a small group of friends.
But age and even a page on Facebook may attract a growing risk to both one's reputation and financial assets and more and more of us are placing these in danger on the internet - easy pickings for an army of fraudsters.
What we need, other than the exercise of common sense, is to adopt a more universal view of the dangers of unrestricted personal information flow than simply have government warn us all to use paper shredders and regularly check our credit ratings.
Perhaps it's time to consider having a personal information policy that restricts as much as possible what we reveal about our lives on the web and reintroducing anonymity, like the beard, as a fashionable virtue.
Comments
There are 3 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
Having never been on the receiving line of phishing emails in the past I was intrigued to find that within a week to me succumbing to pleas from friends and subscribing to Facebook I started to be inundated with them.
While I consider them to be a minor annoyance because they are targeting me in areas where I am not at all vulnerable, I do find it interesting that after 10 years of owning the same Hotmail address, and being admittedly quite lax about giving it out on websites in the past, suddenly it is getting flooded.
How is it that joining websites such as LinkedIn, B3ta, and even Friends Reunited never resulted in the same impact on my junk mail?
It does raise the question, what makes Facebook information so vulnerable in comparison to these other sites, some of which I consider early precursors of the social networking sites and equally as popular.
2. Jack Powers
Lying is the best defence. Any college kid on Beebo or Facebook will tell you that social media profiles are mainly fictional, designed to enhance mating prospects and impress the in-crowd. Sensitive data like bank account specs and ID numbers are not good reading. Sexy photos in posh surroundings, overblown CVs and opinionated blog posts are more to the point.
Besides, most identity theft is merely credit card fraud, often committed by relatives and friends. There's more exposure in unshredded rubbish, poorly protected passwords and social engineering tricksters than there is online.
Security professionals profit from privacy panic, but most social media users are well aware that they're acting in a public space.
3. Simon Moores
The last comment may illustrate the problem quite well. There is now an underground economy dedicated to stealing or even buying one's personal information and selling it on for one reason or another. Anonymity may become the final virtue of the information age.