[Infowarrior] - Some common-sense digital privacy guidelines

[Richard Forno]

(not all-inclusive,but a helpful layperson's start........rf)

January 20, 2007
Your Money
Don¹t Call. Don¹t Write. Let Me Be.
By DAMON DARLIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/20/business/20money.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pag
ewanted=print

The fears of the direct marketing industry came true. Once a do-not-call
list was created, people did register, in droves.

The list was created in 2003, not as a way to protect privacy, but to remove
a powerful irritant from the lives of Americans. The Federal Trade
Commission, which administers the list, says that more than 137 million
phone numbers have been placed on the list by people tired of interruptions
during dinner or their favorite TV show.

The popularity of the do-not-call list unleashed a demand for other opt-out
lists. A consumer can now opt out of the standard practice of their banks or
loan companies selling their information to others. Other opt-outs stop
credit card companies from soliciting consumers or end the flow of junk mail
and catalogs.

While most of the opt-outs are intended to make life less annoying, they can
also have the side effect of protecting personal information that can be
misused by identity thieves or unscrupulous merchants.

³Over the years, it has gotten so much easier to opt out,² said Ari
Schwartz, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a
public interest group that lobbies Congress on privacy issues. ³There are
still gray areas.²

While financial companies have to provide an opportunity to opt out of
sharing personal information, other kinds of companies do not. Some that
tell you they will share the information do not offer the option to protect
personal information (other than not doing business with the company).

For those who just can¹t take it anymore, here is a master list of where you
can take control:

PHONE SOLICITATIONS To stop them, go to donotcall.gov. Or call toll free,
(888)382-1222, from the number you are going to restrict.

Remember to register if you get a new phone number. You can register
cellphone numbers as well. A listing is good for five years, after which
you¹ll have to repeat the process. But you need not worry about forgetting.
You will know when you start receiving sales calls again.

JUNK MAIL You can try to opt out of direct mail solicitations, but it will
probably not work very well. A private organization, the Direct Marketing
Association, handles that list and not every merchant with pages of hot
leads is a rule-abiding member.

If you want to give it a shot anyway, write the association, in care of the
Mail Preference Service at P.O. Box 643, Carmel, N.Y. 10512. There is an
online form at www.the-dma.org/consumers/offmailinglist.html. If you want to
get more mail, there is also a place to sign up to get on the lists.

E-MAIL Whatever you do, do not respond to an unsolicited e-mail message when
it gives you the option to opt out of receiving more e-mail. That is a trick
used by spammers to confirm they hit a live address. Once that happens, your
address goes to a prime list and is sold to other spammers. You may even
find legitimate businesses eventually using addresses on that list.

So how do you prevent spam? Unfortunately, other than spam filters, there
really is no good way.

You can try to make it harder for spammers to get your address in the first
place by never posting your address in public forums. Spammers employ
software to scrape the sites of anything with that @ symbol. Instead spell
it out in a unique way like ³the nameofthiscolumn at nytimes.com.²

CREDIT CARD OFFERS Almost as annoying as the direct marketing call is the
mailbox stuffed with credit card solicitations. The more you ignore their
offers, the more you will receive.

One way to stop the offers is to sign up for so many cards and run up such
high levels of debt that you become a credit untouchable. That is not a good
plan. Instead, call (888) 567-8688, but be ready to give out some personal
information like your Social Security number.

The major credit bureaus, like Experian, Equifax and TransUnion, that
collect information on your borrowing habits let you opt out of what they
call prescreened offers of credit at https://www.optoutprescreen.com. You
can do it for a period of five years or permanently.

Opting out of prescreened offers of credit might also be useful when you
apply for a mortgage. When you seek a loan, the credit bureaus notice and
they put you on a ³trigger list.² The information that you are a ripe
prospect is then sold to other lenders in as little time as 24 hours.
Suddenly, other lenders are calling.

³It hurts the image of our members,² said Harry Dinham, president of the
National Association of Mortgage Brokers. His group also objects because it
could be ³an avenue to identity theft.² He said, ³We actually don¹t know who
they sell it to.²

Still, some callers may actually have better deals than the one your
mortgage broker or bank is offering. ³Do you want to opt out and never learn
how to save money,² asked Stuart Pratt, president of the Consumer Data
Industry Association, a trade group.

Will opting out protect your identity from thieves? Mr. Pratt said that
³lender data tells us that prescreened offers of credit result in lower
levels of fraud.² Nonetheless, he did recommend using a paper shredder on
the offers you do reject.

CREDIT FREEZE The ultimate opt-out for your credit is a credit freeze.
You¹ll sometimes hear it recommended as a way to protect yourself from fraud
because once you sign up to have your credit report frozen, no company can
get access to your credit report without your expressed permission. That
means no one can open up a credit card or take out a loan in your name.

Think long and hard before you do this. It sounds great at first, but doing
so can backfire. You might be buying an expensive flat-screen TV at a
warehouse store and want to get the instant credit card to score another 5
percent discount. You will not be able to. But about half the states have
passed laws making credit reporting companies quickly unfreeze a report,
some in as little as five minutes.

Not that preventing the opening of one more store account is a bad thing.
Remember that everyone of those cards can hurt your credit score, which
determines what your interest rate is when you borrow money.

Use the credit freeze only if you are a true victim of identity theft, which
means that some criminal has your personal information and is opening up
credit card accounts, borrowing money or buying property with your credit
history.

If you suspect you may be a target, but have not been harmed yet, a better
form of protection is asking the credit bureaus to flag your report with a
fraud alert, which is supposed to make lenders take extra precautions.

OTHER OPT-OUTS Your personal information is accessible in less obvious ways.
For instance, your computer tracks where you have visited online.
DoubleClick, a company that collects data for online advertisers, offers a
way to prevent your computer from giving it information at
http://www.doubleclick.com/us/about-doubleclick/privacy/dart-adserving.asp.

But again, it is only a piecemeal solution. Other online advertising
companies will still put ³cookies² on your computer to collect the same
data. So the next-best solution is to frequently run software that cleans
out cookies. You can get Spyware Blaster, Spybot, or Ad-Aware at
www.download.com free.

Your personal information, including parts of your Social security number,
are available in publicly available data bases that you may never see. The
most common ones offer a way to opt out of a listing. Nexis, one of the
biggest, says you can opt out of its people-finding lists by going to
www.lexisnexis.com/terms/privacy/data/remove.asp. Nexis does not make it
easy because it requires that you prove you are a victim of identity theft
before it will consider your application.

The Center for Democracy and Technology provides addresses and forms for
other companies, like ChoicePoint, that do not let you opt out online
(http://opt-out.cdt.org).

REAL ESTATE FILINGS You have to file deeds with the local government office
and once you do, companies swoop in to compile lists of new homeowners from
the public records. That¹s why you get the discount coupons from Home Depot
and other merchants right after you buy. Birth certificates and marriage
licenses are also scraped for data.

There is little you can do about it because the records are intended to be
public. Any good lawyer can show you how to make it a little harder for
personal information to be listed on a deed. But it will cost money, which
is probably not worth it if all you are trying to do is stop solicitations
from Swifty¹s Mortgage Lending and Used Car Sales.

E-mail: yourmoney at nytimes.com