Saturday, March 12, 2005
ID theft for dummies
Uh-oh. An article in IEEE Spectrum online (a journal for electrical and electronics engineers, but I promise you can understand this article) says that a researcher at Carnegie-Mellon has a method of trolling the Web and scooping up -- mainly from resumes, county-government records and the like -- birth dates, Social Security numbers, and all the other info that ID thieves need to ruin your life. Pray that Latanya Sweeney, the associate professor of computer science who's figured this all out, is both smarter and faster than the bad guys. Sobering, very sobering reading.
