Being wired can unknowingly open oneself to identity & physical theft

With the proliferation of networking & social services (twitter, facebook, myspace, etc...) people can unknowingly provide a thief with all the info they need to steal a person blind. The internet never forgets. Something you mention casually may piece together a complete picture of your life over the course of a year.

For instance, the iPhone & new "droid" phones have built in GPS/Geotagging features . The holidays provide opportunity for people to take lots of photos of Christmas presents, family functions, home interiors & so on. Combine that with the instant upload features of Twitter or Flickr & you have just shown the world that you have a 50" TV hanging on your wall along with your address where it can now be picked up. Should you decide to ever leave the house for a vacation or,.....uh,...... ever, you have just shown that your house may be empty for them to come by & pay your valuables a visit.

With the holidays being in full swing there will be plenty of digital locations where a person may post something about their family online. It can be easy to provide family members names, locations, birthdays, pet names, favorite cars, etc.... giving a complete guide to all of the favorite security answers that may be asked should one forget their password to an online account. Remember, this could be something that you may not even do. Your nephew, niece, cousin, etc... who visits may even do this not realizing the implications of their actions. It is very simple to associate family members making it childsplay to get all the info a thief needs to access your online identy & claim your physical one as well.

http://www.augmentedplanet.com/2009/11/do-you-care-about-privacy/

http://www.mobile-spy.com/

http://iphone.iusethis.com/app/gpstracker

Police arrest victim after DNA database linked ID thief to victim

An Oregon woman was recently held overnight after warrants had been issued for her arrest. It seems that various law enforcement agencies across the country had incorrect data entered into them due to a Florida woman using the Oregon womans identity to commit various crimes including prostitution & theft. In some cases, the victims DNA & photo had been linked with the thiefs causing greater confusion. Click the link below to read the whole story.
http://www.katu.com/news/local/69946642.html

This problem began when the Oregon womans purse became lost 5 years ago. She had taken the precautionary measure (at the time) of cancelling her credit cards & getting new identification cards but that did little good.

Payroll cards subject of largest ATM heist,..EVER

NetworkWorld has an article detailing the database breach of RBSWorldPay (one of the largest payroll debit card issuers) & the extremely well co-ordinated effort of a "small army" of people spanning multiple countries that, within 30min, stole approximately 9 million dollars.

Not even Hollywood could dream this one up........

In addition to the theft, 1.5 million people may have had their personal data stolen along w/ 1.1 million social security numbers being breached.

copy & paste this if the link above does not work.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/38366

What the web knows about you (& tells the world)

In this article by Robert Mitchell (computerworld.com) He writes about performing in depth web searches to see what results were returned. He was surprised to find everything from his SS# to digital signatures posted online. What surprised him most was that most of the guilty parties were the government & other businesses related to financial institutions.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9125058