Do you do online surveys?

[ZubrAZ]

... at the same time, send me the invites too, please

[vt_maverick]

Seems like carrying around large wads of cash for groceries, tickets, etc. introduces a new risk...

[vt_maverick]

... at the same time, send me the invites too, please

Lol...

[ZubrAZ]

im a risktaker

[JHarris1385]

Cameras are everywhere. If you are afraid of surveys then you should be afraid to leave your house. Actually you should live in a cave, change your facial appearance and either gain or lose a tremendous amount of weight. This is the world we live in, there are ways to overcome anything and everything, you might as well make the most of it.

You should obviously be intelligent enough to know which sites are fake and viruses or not, that is practically common sense.

[FlyingV77]

if you pay for everything cash, you can usaly get a 3-4% discount. some gas stastions give as much as 10% off for cash transactions.
as for the SSN it is against the law to ask for or require it for anything other than SS reasons. almost all banks and Credit cards ask for them. but, if you speak to the manger and inform them of the laws, (they all know them) sometimes they will wave the "requirement". sometimes they wont, it is a big money maker for them to sell your info.
The tin foil hat people are almost always right. "they" are out to get you.
P.S. i used to be big brother

[Marlin]

As for the airline ticket with cash,still gotta provide ID info which gets recorded and scanned and so on. So, to win the war on identity theft, aluminum foil or a faraday cage wallet (we learned the hard way in Hong Kong, they can scan your cards through your clothes with magnetic card readers without ever touching you) never travel, no bank accounts, don't buy anything and that means guns are out the door, which is not really an option, don't use the internet, no drivers license, no insurance, no house....damn, sounds like I need to move to Antarctica or Tennessee (people in TN can't read, so I will be safe there )

[JHarris1385]

3-4% discount using cash...You get points on your cards. If you get the right card the points are more than 3-4%. Shell fuel gives you discounts for using Visa around here. The cash incentives are not that large and are not that widespread.

Doing online surveys is the least of our privacy worries.

[samneil2000]

....damn, sounds like I need to move to Antarctica or Tennessee (people in TN can't read, so I will be safe there )

Good thing I can't read or I'd be offended.

[circmand]

It is not a crime to give fake information on those store discount cards. Of course dont try to cash a check there with one.

[vt_maverick]

as for the SSN it is against the law to ask for or require it for anything other than SS reasons. almost all banks and Credit cards ask for them. but, if you speak to the manger and inform them of the laws, (they all know them) sometimes they will wave the "requirement".

So how does the bank make the link between your credit report and you? Without your SSN it seems like that leaves a lot of room for false reporting.

[Stephen Biko]

So by your logic, I assume you don't use a credit card or check card. You pay full price for things at the grocery store vice using the store discount card. You don't have a cell phone, or cable/satellite tv or ISP? You don't do online banking? Drivers license, taxes, airline tickets, bills, you give away so much information for free, might as well get paid a bit.

Like I said - more power to you if that's what you want to do. However, your extremely defensive response suggests simple denial rather than an educated evaluation of the risk-reward trade-off.

And for the record - I don't use grocery loyalty cards, I only shop at stores that don't have loyalty card programs. Not only are they a prime example of a poor trade off between a significant amount of privacy for a handful of dollars, they are actually a false economy. See this article for an explanation: http://www.nocards.org/savings/regul...ce_study.shtml

If you spend your time worrying about stuff like that, that means you have something to worry about.

Of course I have something to worry about - increased privacy means increased safety and security. Your suggestion that "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide" is naive at best. Privacy isn't about hiding bad things, its about not making it easy for people to hurt you. You might as well argue that the only reason to hang curtains in your windows or use sealed envelopes instead of postcards is to hide criminal activity, or that only bad drivers need to wear seatbelts. Only a fool would believe those things because after decades, even centuries, of experiences the risks have been made obvious to even the most incurious - information security is just in it's infancy so most people haven't really given it much thought. My point in responding to you is to say - hey maybe you should think about this a little bit more than you have been.

As for the surveys, they never ask for your name or address or phone number and so on.

If they pay you they have enough information to connect the dots and if you think they don't do everything they possibly can to connect those dots, you just haven't been paying attention. Here's a good place to start to understand the mentality of the people you are dealing with - at that bastion of tinfoil paranoia the wall street journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...512989404.html

By the way, I just pulled up your profile, now I have your email, your city, how many posts, when you were logged in....j/k, well, I can get those things,

No you can't. I practice what I preach. Try googling me if you don't believe me.

I will give away a couple of dots - I spend a lot of time thinking about information security because it's my job. I was one of the engineers that built the current IAFIS in Clarksburg and I regularly consult on information security to a few large organizations you've probably heard of, from the sound of it one of them may even employ you. I'm probably the only VX owner to ever work IAFIS so, in the right hands, that information is enough to identify me. I choose to reveal it because I believe the trade-off of dispelling the accusations of tinfoil-hattery to be worth the unlikely chance that anyone reading this is able to cross reference that group of engineers with the group of VX owners. More practicing what I preach about risk-reward trade-offs.

And, while I'm at it, here is a interesting essay on how just three pieces of information - gender, zip code and birth date is enough to uniquely identify almost 90% of the US population and how that can (and has) lead to unexpected disclosures of personal information: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/0...ry-and-privacy.

[vt_maverick]

I think I stopped worrying when my government job forced me to give up my SSN, fingerprints, full background history, financial info, etc. to gain employment. Once your privacy has been raped at that level and you get an insider view into how disturbingly casual the government is with safeguarding your information it's difficult to get spun up about protecting your identity. The human in the loop for those things that do require your information is always the weakest link, so all the caution and anti-intrusion systems in the world still leave you exposed.

[Stephen Biko]

There is a big difference in systemic risk and one-offs. It sounds like you are referring to the information on the SF-86 - used for clearances - there is a lot of legal protection for that information. My experience has been that the security people who handle SF-86's are very diligent, although I do have my share of stories about people who got fired for being sloppy -- but they were fired.

No such legal protections exist for commercially collected data and consequently there is practically no control of that information and no consequences for misuse - in fact what normal people would consider misuse is just another business opportunity to the people who collect it.

[vt_maverick]

Unfortunately it's the people between the individual and their security professionals that most often cause the problems, and in the case of military organizations (in my experience) there is little to no consequence for leaks. For example, when my wife separated from the Air Force, she was supposed to receive her mobility folder, which contained essentially everything that uniquely identified and documented her time in the service. That included dog tags, DNA registration, comprehensive medical history, and complete financial record. When she went to pick it up she was informed by a young airman that approximately a third of her squadron's mobility folders had been lost, and that they assumed they were accidentally shredded. Subsequent inquiries up the chain yielded no result, and is often the case in the military, an E-3's complaint just doesn't receive as much attention as that of an O-6. She was basically told not to worry about it.

A year later the office contacted her to ask why she had never picked up her records. Apparently after a year of being missing, they had magically reappeared. And the best part was that the current staff denied that they had ever been lost. So it makes you wonder, what happened during that period of time? Think those legal protections will ever stop that kind of thing from happening? IMHO, not while 19 year-olds are the ones doing it (I know I know, there are tons of responsible 19 year-olds in the service who do a great job for their country, but there are a significant number of screwballs too.) and while you have line management who refuses to ensure there are consequences for mistakes.

So while I agree with you that in principle the government affords us more protection under the law, in reality I think the risk ends up being about the same.