Comments on Privacy, Even Little Brother is Watching

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it's amazingly easy to harvest information on the web.  now, you don't even have to click the submit button on web forms for a company to get your info.  Wireless internet allows anyone with a packet sniffer to grab unencrypted information from request headers.  As a rule, i don't send anything sensitive over the internet unless i know for a fact i can trust the source...it's just too easy to get fucked...

posted by _the_staggering_genius_ on September 16, 2006 at 10:53 PM | link to this | reply

Bahstids.
We had a credit card number hijacked. My wif watches this stuff, and reported it STAT. They caught him,  stupid postadolescent male...bahstid.

posted by majroj on September 16, 2006 at 8:33 PM | link to this | reply

Maj
Well duh, I am too stressed out.  I hadn't even considered that.  I just went through an identity theft, too.  They didn't ask me to go to any site, or ask for any information.  They just told me to double check my work.   I haven't heard back, but that doesn't mean they're bogus.  I written 3 major companies via their 24-hour, we-swear-we'll-answer sites, and I haven't heard from any of them ever. 

posted by terpgirl30 on September 16, 2006 at 7:39 PM | link to this | reply

Consider Occam's Razor...are you SURE it was from Intuit?

I'm a rank amateur, but I can make an email look real, the trick being to get (or just use)a convincing looking email return address, maybe a bogus business telephone line with an answering machine that picks up on the first ring and instead of "Sorry I couldn't come to the phone" it says "All circuits are busy, please leave your name, telephone number and account number...". You can guess the rest.

But, as you say, imbedded software to track you is not at all impossible.

posted by majroj on September 15, 2006 at 12:18 AM | link to this | reply