What the Web knows about you
There may be a whole lot more information about you on the Web than you realize. At Computerworld, Robert Mitchell relates what he found when he undertook to see how much of his personal information could be obtained on the Web. The results are alarming. Mitchell begins his article:
She had me at hello … or just about. Our conversation had barely started when privacy activist Betty Ostergren interrupted me to say that she had found my full name, address, Social Security number and a digital image of my signature on the Web.
I had set out to discover just how much information I could find about myself online, and Ostergren, who runs the Virginia Watchdog Web site, was my very first call. If this was what could be uncovered in just a few minutes, what else would I find? Quite a bit, as it turns out.
What information is available about you in cyberspace? Where does it come from? What risks does it present and what, if anything, can you do to protect yourself? To answer those questions I decided to use my own identity, Robert L. Mitchell, a national correspondent at Computerworld, as my research subject.
As an example of what Mitchell found, he began with government records and this is what they revealed about him:
Information discovered: Full legal name, address, Social Security number, spouse’s name and Social Security number, price paid for home, mortgage documents, signature
Much of the publicly available information on individuals online is sourced from online county, state and federal government records databases, and this is where Ostergren found my Social Security number. She hadn’t purchased it from a hacker chat room or from shady characters in Russia. She got it by browsing an image of a mortgage document stored in a county database located in a building half a mile from my house.
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