| Identity Theft "Angel" is Looking Out for You |
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Carnegie Mellon University professor Latanya Sweeney has developed a program called "Identity Angel," a sort of specialized search engine that trolls online job boards and other sources to look for what she calls the "Holy Trinity" of personally identifying information -- a person's name, address, and Social Security number.
If the Identity Angel program finds all three, and can locate the person's e-mail address, they will receive an automated message warning them that their identity may potentially be in danger.
"Imagine a benevolent program that e-mails people for whom information, freely available on the Web can be combined sufficiently to impersonate them in financial transactions," Sweeney wrote. "This is the ambitious goal of 'Identity Angel.'"
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| Some Tips as Kids Head Back to College |
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Here is a list of tips for students as they head back to college. The most important and least followed is:
Don't download just anything. Spyware, Trojans and other malicious programs are sometimes hidden in software such as screen savers available for free on some websites. It's always something that's free, and it's often something that is designed to be enticing. If you don't know the site or who you are dealing with, don't install it.
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| A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher |
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Buried in a list of 20 million Web search queries collected by AOL and recently released on the Internet is user No. 4417749. The number was assigned by the company to protect the searcher's anonymity, but it was not much of a shield.
It did not take much investigating to follow the data trail to Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Ga., frequently researches her friends' medical ailments and loves her three dogs. ''Those are my searches,'' she said, after a reporter read part of the list to her.
But the detailed records of searches conducted by Ms. Arnold and 657,000 other Americans, copies of which continue to circulate online, underscore how much people unintentionally reveal about themselves when they use search engines -- and how risky it can be for companies like AOL, Google and Yahoo to compile such data.
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