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Selling Other People's Identities
joeflies writes "The San Francisco Chronicle has an extensive article on the controversial site Jigsaw, which makes it easy to sell other people's identity information. Jigsaw encourages people to collect business cards and email signature blocks, which is compiled together into a searchable database. Participants earn points towards their own searches or earn money.
Is this exactly what Scott McNealy meant when he said electronic privacy is dead?"
Can business cards be classed as private? Surely the idea of giving them out is so they get spread far and wide?
...conduct a concerted effort to steal the identy of jigsaw's CEO (Jim Fowler), then use that identity to sink his company.
Since this business contact information, be it on business card or in email signature is already willfully given out by owner I think it is not "selling out people identity" strictly speaking. It is a kind of mining and aggregating public data.
Very dangerous territory.
Better stop handing out those Daily Planet business cards.
--Superman
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Wow, that's messed up.
Fowler, the CEO of Jigsaw, is quoted as making an interesting comparison in the article. He likens Jigsaw to Wikipedia in so much as Jigsaw is a user-supported advertisment database, like Wikipedia is a user-supported encyclopedia.
What he fails to realize is just how far this user-supportedness can go. Just like with Wikipedia, I imagine that Jigsaw will be hounded by vandals and the like, dumping loads and loads of false information into Jigsaw's database.
Moreover, since Jigsaw is going against basic principles of privacy, I can imagine that we're going to see a lot more problems than with Wikipedia from "vigilante vandals".
Given how stupid your average human is, though, there isn't much hope for the former.
The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.
As posters already pointed out, there are no such things as private business cards. Besides, your local library probably has access to ReferenceUSA, which is a compendium of Personal and Business information extraordinaire. Opinion: overreaction.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Do they have pictures of the people's faces too?
Cause for $2k you can go to a site like Thermage.com and copy someone's face, jigsaw style.
Logan's Run, anyone?
Sell your soul! Hell, sell someone else's soul! We don't care! We at evilpeople.com, we will buy souls wholseale!
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Hello $FetchFirstNameFromIP, would you like to play a game?
Upon reflection, I probably just gave a huge hint to some unconnected soul out there wanting to play the Jigsaw game...
To quote Kosh from Babylon 5, "And so it begins."
For ages, these same poor put upon privacy-deprived businesses have been pirating our personal information and trading it around.
Now it has come back home to bite them on the butt.
Maybe now we'll see them use their lobbyists to buy some privacy laws. Then everyone will want to participate in those protections. Hmmmmmm. Good idea, Jigsaw!
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
"Moreover, since Jigsaw is going against basic principles of privacy, I can imagine that we're going to see a lot more problems than with Wikipedia from "vigilante vandals""
And what "basic principles" would that be?
The scandal is not that people are selling and buying that kind of information. The scandal is that companies accept that kind of information as identification information.
The scandal is that anyone can pretend to be me by knowing my name, address, phone number, and social security number, and little more sometimes, but not always. NONE of those pieces of information was EVER meant to be secret. We have to write our social security number in zillion of places, our employers know it - nobody in his right mind could trust that as a piece of identification information!
Yet this is exactly what companies do, because they bear little of the cost, and there is no legislation that forces them to be more selective with what they accept as identification information (read with what little info one could access the phone record of Thomas Perkins).
And all the while, better tools for identifications are widely available. I could identify myself to my bank simply by sending them a PGP-signed email: all that this requires of me is to click on the "sign it" button in Thunderbird - and I get incredibly better security than monkeying around with SSNs.
Yes, people with PGP tend to have small webs of trust - but this is because of lack of legislation that requires better identification for transaction, and also, for lack of public services. In my city, want to tell the tree pruners that the city tree next to my house needs some pruning? There is a phone number and a very kind and helpful employee on the other end of the line. Want to get your PGP key signed by a city/county officer that checks your papers thoroughly? No hope. You have to somehow know someone who is connected enough to others that need PGP (package maintainers, for instance). Tree haestetics surely ranks higher than basic identity security, even though our nation is more and more based on remote transactions.
Our legislation, and public services, are late some 20 years regarding identity management. The scandal is that they are not brought up to date faster, not that some people are selling email footers that we send around for free.
"Given how stupid your average human is, though, there isn't much hope for the former."
Funny how the people who say this, always manage to exclude themselves from the herd.
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The title given to this section is misleading. My ID was stolen when I was 18, and I've lived the last seven years of my life as the victim of ID theft. Business information is not selling identities. Selling my driver's license number, social, etc., would be.
Although annoying, truthfully this guy isn't doing anything wrong and it seems he's compiling a database of business contact information accessible via a paid subscription or by adding business contact info. Only if he allowed personal or home information would this be wrong.
I always get this odd sens eo fpride at how much goes on in my own back yard, and it reminds me of part of the reason I love living in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area.
It's a girl!
And all the while, better tools for identifications are widely available. I could identify myself to my bank simply by sending them a PGP-signed email: all that this requires of me is to click on the "sign it" button in Thunderbird - and I get incredibly better security than monkeying around with SSNs.
Yes, and no. You get better security, as long as your system isn't trojaned, wormed, or compromised. (And no, running Linux or OSX doesn't make you immune to these problems, though it helps) And so long as a multitude of other factors are considered. Such as:
1) Does your private key reflect sufficient randomness?
2) Does the 1-way function used to generate your private key have a "back door" making for trivial penetration?
3) Is your private key sufficiently private?
4) Is your bank USING PGP to authenticate?
5) Is THEIR private key really private? (If not, there's room for a man-in-the-middle attack)
But, even if those issues didn't exist, this solution simply doesn't scale well. What about people who don't have computers? What about people who can barely turn them on? What about people who are illiterate? What about people who don't speak english? How do you make sure that this works when the power is out?
And, if you think phishing is a problem now, boy, just wait until word gets around that private keys are such a big deal!
Our legislation, and public services, are late some 20 years regarding identity management. The scandal is that they are not brought up to date faster, not that some people are selling email footers that we send around for free.
A great sound bite. Unfortunately, it's just not true. You haven't presented a solution that works well, is cheap, widely understandable, fails gracefully, and is in the reach of the average (non-techie) Joe.
What solution presents all of these?
Certainly not your PGP "Web of Trust".
I'm a techie-type, who tends towards paranoia in security, and I've never set it up. It simply offers no real value. Hardly anybody else uses it, and if they did, they wouldn't care about the signed email. Realistically, nobody's going to say "Yes, I knowed it was you, because the Email was SIGNED!!!".
If somebody spoofs an email, it's pretty easy to look in the headers to identify that it wasn't me, and nobody has ever spoofed me to my detriment. Nor do I know anybody who's been so spoofed to their detriment, either. I've seen SPAM go out with forged from: addresses, but nobody believes that the penis pillz offer actually came from that person. Additionally, even if you encrypt an email so that only the recipient can see it, that recipient is then free to forward your message (without encryption) to whomever they like. So, your email is still a matter of public record. The rules of the game are simple: don't send an email that would be a problem if forwarded.
So what was this PGP thingy supposed to do for me, again?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Is to provide large quantities of fictious information! Rapidly aquire your own search points and help depreciate the quality of the database at the same time!
Hooray for social de-engineering!
How much is your name worth?
How much is your soul worth?
Look, they could issue (for $100? or how much it costs) to people devices which are able to sign with a private key a short string of digits (16? 20?) that they dictate to you over the phone. You dictate back the 20 digits of the signature. The company verifies with the public key on record. No complication, no computer needed.
Ultimately secure? Not. The keys would be most likely too short, yadayada. But anything like this would be VASTLY better than relying on the same 9-digit fixed number (the SSN) that appears in cleartext on every kind of document, and of which there are hundreds of copies lying around in offices around the country, from banks to insurance companies to medical offices to schools to universities to... you get the idea.
But until there is some legislative incentive to put this into place, companies will want to avoid carrying the cost of identifying you more properly, and will be happy to give out your information to anyone who collects a bit of knowledge about you.
The situation will change only when legislation will be introduced, or when consumers will essentially refuse to deal with companies with weak identification procedures (I am not holding my breath on this).
Before many /.'ers were born (or sentient, anyway), Lotus released Lotus Marketplace, a database of 7 Million business (then individuals) for use by whoever for whatever. The uproar in 1991 caused Lotus to discontinue these offerings. Now it's really no big deal that several companies do it, but people don't want a bunch of individuals doing it. Slippery slope... but we're so far along it that there's no point in trying to stop it.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
A beow... Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't know I was here.
For my needs, I don't steal identities, I make them. :-)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Quite a few times I've thought, wouldn't it be nice if America had the same data privacy laws... this is a good example of why they're needed.
In the UK a database of personally-identifiable information automatically needs permission from every single individual concerned, unless it's exempt for some reason. Even if it is exempt the data can only be kept for the purpose it was collected for, and not shared. Once it's no longer needed it has to be destroyed.
It's a good example of putting individual rights before business interests. Not something the USA excels at...
"Is this exactly what Scott McNealy meant when he said electronic privacy is dead?"
Yes. This is exactly what he meant.
After leaving his job as CEO of Sun, McNealy went on to found Jigsaw.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Look, they could issue (for $100? or how much it costs...
Ok. 300 Million people in the USA. Times $100. That's $30 BILLION dollars. So much for cheap.
to people devices which are able to sign with a private key a short string of digits (16? 20?) that they dictate to you over the phone. You dictate back the 20 digits of the signature.
Ever enter a WEP key? It's 26 letters long. I have to retype one at LEAST 2 or 3 times TWICE in order to get it to work, when I have the key printed right in front of me. Do you REALLY think that's going to work reliably over the phone?
No complication, no computer needed.
Eh, let's see. We're going to relay a 20-character random text key twice over the phone, in and out of a $100 computing device. How is this either one of "No complication" or "no computer needed" !?!?!? What is that $100 thingy if not a limited-function computer?
What happens if you lose your $100 thingy?
Ultimately secure? Not.
Meaning, it isn't even a particularly good assurance of what you're after.
But anything like this would be VASTLY better than relying on the same 9-digit fixed number (the SSN) that appears in cleartext on every kind of document, and of which there are hundreds of copies lying around in offices around the country, from banks to insurance companies to medical offices to schools to universities to... you get the idea.
The problem is that you are trying to solve a social problem with a technical solution. You can't do that. No amount of technology usage would eliminate crime. Your solutions is simply too complicated and expensive to work well. Furthermore, it doesn't fail gracefully. Somebody gets your $100 thingie, and they suddenly can do whatever they want with your bank accounts and whatnot.
I STRONGLY recommend that you read some of Bruce Schnier's work. He started out like you - thoroughly convinced that the proper use of encryption could solve all of society's security ills, through his best-selling book "Applied Cryptography".
But then, the real world showed him how he was simply wrong. He was smart enough to swallow his pride and learn his lessons, and he's subsequently become one of the worlds leading experts on system security. Some of his best works include "Secrets and Lies", and his most recent: "Beyond Fear".
Give it a chance. You could make a 6-figure career by applying his principles!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
The FEDERAL government should start an X.509 PKI. It should issue CA keys all the state governments. They can pass them down to the birth-certificate-issuing level. Then, instead of a birth certificate, you get a credit card with a smart card which has a key signed up through the federal one.
Any COTS smart card reader could verify that you are legit.
This would cost a little bit of money initially, but it would pay for itself thousands of times over due to the reduction it fraud.
It isn't perfect--it is as close as we could get, though. CRL distribution? Hell, it could be broadcast over AM radio, from GPS sats, whatever. Not a big deal.
Whether you have been a victim of identity fraud or not, YOU ARE PAYING FOR IT in terms of increased costs on everything you buy. Federal PKI is the solution to identity fraud.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
He seems important. I've got no fewer than nine business cards from him, all different.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Jigsaw isn't putting up your grandmother's Social Security number, nor is it hosting pictures of you and your dog. All they host (and all they want) is business contact information. This isn't a violation of privacy... it's a boon for businesses to contact other businesses. It has no desire to be a Zabasearch clone.
If the submitter had bothered to read the article, they would've seen this very important message:
So there you go. Someone decides to conglomerate the information any moron can find in a "Contact" page on a corporate Web site, and the privacy nuts freak out — despite the fact that it has nothing to do with privacy. I love how some people commented about creating fake identites and submitting them. Well, unless Mr. John Doe has his own domain and business license, I don't think that fake info will do any good!
Perhaps CowboyNeal needs to see a psychiatrist about his manic-depressive and schizophrenic paranoia disorders. At the very least, he should apologize to Jigsaw (if not to all of Slashdot).
Speaking of privacy, theres a much better way to talk online with people we already know and trust.Grupus
the world is spherical
Since you are the author of your own life, the copyright of all data connected to you should be yours en you should get the money and give permission. Currently companies claim the copyright on your personal data! Likewise is it strange that for instance Google and the ad-sense publishers are making money on your data, which they collect without your permission and store forever. In fact they steal it from you and don't honour the author of the data. Jigsaw has much better ethics and it is at least transparent what information is collected, how they collect it and what is done with it. That is the way it should be! They could make a giant leap if they would reward people who have provided their own data, everytime the data or advertising is sold and thus respect the authorship of the provider and original owner of the data.
Good. I see the connection: Scott McNealy is from Sun, Sun produced java, and Jigsaw was written in java. Glad there's no namespace confusion here.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
They have the contact details by definition, so there's no reason they couldn't be contacting people and asking permission put them in the database.
This site would be illegal in the UK, thanks to the Data Protection Act - the data is obtained unfairly, it does not keep the data secure, it does not have safeguards for accuracy, the data is being used for purposes not disclosed to the data subject, etc.
If anyone wants to call this article an overreaction, reply with your real name, full address, telephone number, and employer. Or shut up.
$100. Cheap. How much do you think it costs you to get a passport? Or a driver licence? Same order of magnitude. And most likely, if you mass produce it, it could be $20 (it shouldn't cost more than a pocket calculator).
Lose it? Call and ask for the key to be revoked. Somebody else voids your key? It is a nuisance, to be sure: bring it in and have it reprogrammed. I mean, also credit cards get lost, it's not the end of the world.
Somebody get my $100 thingie? They can do exactly what they can do if they know my SSN (the thingie could ask for a pin before spitting out the signature).
I also don't believe in a foolproof and perfect technical solution. But anything is better than the current solution of NO security at all. They might as well use my licence plate rather than my SSN - at least it's written in fewer places online!
I received an e-mail one day from someone selling a how-to book. The advertisement had a plug for Jigsaw at the bottom citing it as the source, so I decided to check this out. The e-mail address it came to was one that I'd given only to HP for their reseller program. The address and other info Jigsaw had about me matched the mailing address I'd given HP, which was pretty new at the time and I'd only given it HP. I guess someone at HP decided to earn Jigsaw points by stealing HP's list.
/dev/null. I just won't do business with them anymore.
I had no luck contacting Jigsaw or deleting my information from their site via their form, but I did complain about this to HP. HP contacted me the next day and appologized for letting this happen. Shortly thereafter my information from Jigsaw was removed.
I've also caught several other companies that promise to not share my contact information using the same method. It's pretty effective and I just redirect those stolen addresses to
Jigsaw may claim that their information is only from sources like business cards that are handed out, but I can say for certain in my case that they just got a stolen customer list. They have no way of assuring that the data comes from legal sources like business cards. I see lawsuits in their future as they get more publicity like this. "We didn't know it was stolen" is not an acceptable excuse.
How is Jigsaw's different from a huge business-cards trash-can? Is trash private? If not, why not wait and see what can they make out of that mess
cut this signatures madness. stop reading them now!
There is no sense in complaining about it since the whole US legal system happens to be designed to protect people's freedoms (such as the one to trade other people's identity information) from the snap judgement of their fellow man, especially when those freedoms are unpopular. And as we all know it's common business practice to disregard most "moral" considerations in the pursuit of revenues. Of course there is always the possibility of those revenues being affected by the backlash of being unpopular, but the decision criterion is always revenue, never morals or ethics. So impopularity only works if the backlash is large enough and inescapable enough. And that only for as long as the costs outweigh the benefits.
Which it probably won't be of course ... there are far too many issues clamouring for everyone's attention to guarantee that anyone who doesn't devote his whole spare time (or even his whole life) to being angry and upset about this or that abuse or scandal just won't have the time to much of an effective force. A handful of grumblers won't matter, but one powerful grumbler does. From the article it's interesting to see that when an individual complains to this company to have his own information removed, he is ignored. When HP complains, the information is taken down pronto. A clear case of cost-benefit tradeoff: an individual's ire (he hasn't got rights, but he might make a nuisance of himself) doesn't count for much. A large company's ire (they don't have any rights either, but they can afford a battery of lawyers to make life difficult for you) is something to be taken very seriously. Elementary economics.
Therefore, as I see it, new legislation is the only way to stop this sort of thing. Personally I would be in favour of legislation stating that you and you alone "own" your identity data, and that no-one (especially no companies) may hold or store any piece of it without your permission, and that they are obliged by law to fully disclose all information they hold on you upon first request, and that they are obligated to allow you to correct any information they hold on you, say within 20 business days. All of this enforceable on pain of say a 1000$ fine per case.
That would be too bad for companies that make a living from trading information, but I happen to rank my privacy over their survival and I wouldn't mind seeing them go.
The point is of course that the majority doesn't seem to support any such law. So unless there is enough political will to enact some legislation to protect our identity information from being sold it's no use grumbling. Unless you manage to grumble loudly enough to make an impact of course.
The European way to handle personal information is via ownership establishment.
In EU the personal information is owned by the respective person and anyone how is copying personal information without the consent of the owners to that information is pirating the information. The only execption to this is the official records regulated by individual laws i.e. criminal records.
This fact is also the corner stone of the ruling which forbids the handing of personal information of travelers to US officials, because in US there is legal respect of this ownership.
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So I have to ask, is the reason Slashdot is refusing to let me log in, and meta-moderation has been down for four days now...because CowboyNeal and CmdrTaco are waiting for the eBay auction to close. I think I'll bid $0.25 for all the users and passwords on slashdot.
I kid, I kid.
I actually have a few business cards, email addresses and other tracking sources that would most likely cause you to search in all the wrong places for me. It was actually for a LARP, but then again, why not use it to cover tracks? If you can't avoid data being collected about you, just make sure the data is false.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
there's a special place in hell.
It's only a matter of time and these databases will be poisoned much like spammers lists were, but with a catch. I'm sure law enforcement, insurance, and financial organizations will create false identities and monitor them for when someone bites, laying traps within the data to further poison the database. It can be a lucrative income for the government to nail companies who do dialing operations or large identity stealing operations.
In reality, it's about the accuracy of the information you encounter, not the breadth. Humans will need to, at some point, verify that all the information within a database is correct or it will become poisoned on an exponential scale. That's when things get difficult because then you need multiple reliable ways to acquire data and assemble it together into a database.
The time to begin worrying is when accurate databases begin to be put online and opened to the private and public sectors. For example, I went to pay a ticket today and noticed the courts schedule for every case in every courthouse in the entire state of illinois are within a computer system accessable by a terminal near the desk I payed the ticket at. Very handy if the state wants to cut costs, but also, very dangerous because that's one more bit of information that's online in a database that can be tied into another system with nothing more than a daily download. When will they enter title information into such a system to track it instead of working with just the paperwork? Social security accounts? Bank account information? Housing insurance information?
Information is a commodity; it's value is determined by it's accuracy, pertinance, cost to obtain, and use. When accurate databases of general information are opened to the world for everyone to acquire, the information itself will become useless. Everyones digital presance will no longer be accurate and companies such as credit card companies and banks will not be able to tell what house they sold on which loan to which SSN, because they will not be able to proove such information in a court of law as when one individuals digital identity is being used in 20 locations 1000 miles apart, nobody can be responsable but the bank even IF it's one individuals responsability and they had a contractual clause obligating them to pay for all thefts of data and the result, they still would have to proove it was them. Therefor many businesses have a very good incentive to keep your information private and protected.
Woman walks up to man with Russian accent sitting in black van: "I'd like to buy an identity" Man hops out of van, slides open side door, there's just a computer inside. He points at an Excel sheet: "Ahh, yes! I have maaaany identities for sale, veeery cheap! Look at this one, the Silkwood: Visa Classic, SI number, excellent credit rating! It fell off back of truck." Woman points to computer screen Excel sheet: "No, I want something more powerful. Hmmm... what about that one?" Man pushes her hand away: "That's the Commando 450, I don't sell that one. Now-" Woman: "That's what I want! I want the Commando 450!" Man: "Lady, that one is is too powerfull. Platinum Corporate Amex, it's used in the circus trade to buy elephants!" Woman: "I'll pay you (takes out wad of cash) this much for it!"
Our data protection laws in the UK aren't nearly as powerful as you (and most people) think, unfortunately, and while I think our current Information Commissioner is a pretty good guy, he can only protect our privacy with the powers he's given in law.
For example, take a look at the kind of data Transport for London have (or at least used to have) in their data protection entry, and tell me it's really all needed to meet the business requirements of that organisation.
Moreover, the number of exemptions is pretty staggering. Why are credit reference agencies permitted to keep vast amounts of personal data about me without my consent? (Don't tell me it's those signs at the shop counters; I read the small print, and I've read my credit report, and the two are not related in any meaningful way.) The last time I dealt with a credit reference agency (to clean up someone else's mistake that was black-marking my record incorrectly) I discovered that there were, quite literally, more inaccurate entries in my record than accurate ones. After waiting on hold for more than half an hour to speak to someone about them, I was asked after about five minutes "whether it really mattered", since "it's after 6pm and I'm supposed to be going home now". Seriously, that's what they told me, after a half-hour on hold, when the records they had on me that could directly affect my ability to get a mortgage or something were written in someone's dreamland.
Other legal powers aren't as great as you might expect, either. For one thing, while you can normally get bad information corrected, if you just don't want someone to store your personal information any more, you can't make them stop, as long as they're registered for that purpose. Take Amazon, for example. I bought from them using a credit card for the first time not so long ago. After going through the usual signing-up process and completing my order, I discovered that they are now keeping my credit card number on-file, and will use it any time someone makes an order from them using my login and password (which they control), without any further attempt to confirm my identity or intent to make that transaction. Can I make them drop that number from their database and opt to re-enter it every time I make a purchase instead? Take a guess. And this in a world where thousands of people's credit card numbers or other personal details have been "misplaced" by large businesses in the past year alone, and in a country where the law does not currently require a company making such mistakes to disclose them publicly or to pay any particularly heavy fines for doing so.
So while I agree we have better data protection laws than many, I think we have a long way to go before our data is protected as well as it should be.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Way back before the digital revolution you could find everything you wanted to know about somebody... woha, wait a min, backup. This is about companies! Even more publicly available... let's settle down on the privacy issues. If you have something to hide then you deserve to be embarassed :P. It's just like those getting caught at a traffic light and being sent a ticket electronically. "OOh, it's bad, I'm protesting, the government is spying on me!" Come on, fess up, you got caught stop being a whiny. While this isn't exactly the same there are some odd parallels.
Unfortunately, you have bigger things to worry about than jigsaw. Apparently another company has published far more personal information about you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC_Comics
I love that "privacy is dead" quote of his.
Of course, I'll actually believe it when he posts his credit card numbers, nude pictures of his wife, and the itinerary and security arrangements for his family for the next month on a public web site.
Until he puts his money where his mouth is, he's just defending unethical behaviour with a sound-bite.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I believe you misunderstand. The basic idea is that within Europe, the data protection laws require certain guarantees about how personal information will be stored and processed. One such requirement is that the information may not be transferred outside Europe unless the place they're being transferred to has sufficiently strong safeguards in place to make the same guarantees. The US isn't anywhere close -- it does not recognise the level of control you describe as ownership -- and therefore any European organisation that gave the information to someone in the US would be in a deep pile or brown stuff.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Wait, there was this link to people willing to solve Captchas for 50 cents an hour. Hire them to fill it with bogus info.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Personally I don't see this as the privacy invasion of the century. But all the same I hate having to talk to cold calling sales people and I figure the less of them that I hang up on the lower my chances of one of them having the balls to call back and complain to my boss about my rude behavior. So I went in and edited my contact info. E-mail address is now bogus and the phone number goes to local time and temperature. If by some chance someone wants to send me a letter that is OK with me. As an added bonus if you edit your own info no other user can edit afterwards. I don't use the service but you can edit your own record (or any record you can check the e-mail for) without signing up.
This is first time I hear about usage of that type of identity theft (business card information).
After I read the article, I realized that it is mostly not about identity theft, but privacy. Not about "identity" information, but "contact" information. The original title of the article says nothing about identity theft. It does mention it in general terms in the text.
Very misleading title. What is wrong, BTW, of copying the original title, if you are not sure you understood the article? Right. The problem is the submitter is always supersure that he understands the article.
In short. The article describes just another spammers database of contact information. Not identity thieves. Spammers.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
in germany it is illegal to pass someones name,adress,phonenumber,etc on without his approval...
thats why there are always guys on the street asking people if they want to win this and that - they only have to answer the quiz question (like 2+2=4 or 60000000000000?) where the damn answer is somewhere on the pamphlet and if you don't know, then they tell you the answer BECAUSE they only want you to fill out the form (name, adress, phone number) and SIGN that you agree to the conditions of the tombola
the conditions are on the back side of the form, written in light gray in font size 0.1 and CLEARLY contain the condition that they are allowed to sell your personal data....
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
and what happens then is that you get three damn phone calls every day by someone who asks you if you want to play the lottery (95% of your money are administrative charges, if it were 100% then it was fraud, but this way it is legal) or they ask you about your phone bill, you can save money with them! and if you want a broshure, you get a letter "thank you for signing up AND SO ON
man, I hate these a$$holes... there really should be a new law, because these crooks slip through the holes in the current law - public gambling is illegal, but if you have to answer a question like "who is president of the USA, george w bush or elmo from sesame street?" it is not gambling, but a quiz...
it should be completely illegal to pass someones personal data on for money...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
is this article doing up? "Oh no! Someone will get ahold of my business contact information and call me to... give... me... business. Where should I be paranoid again?"
Goddamn, I'm a privacy advocate and all but this is fucking stupid. Take it down already.
It would also be illegal in Canada too:_ Protection_and_Electronic_Documents_Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Information
http://www.privacyinfo.ca/
For the record, this privacy law definitely makes writing inhouse programs for the enterprise interesting since you can't automatically assume that just because you have information available for use in the company, that you reuse it for another use within the company, even if the typical employee would expect such reuse to happen. You have to be explicit when you collect it or go back to people and get their permission after the fact about the new use. If they balk, you can't use that info. Period.
In the case of the business cards, if you place "please refer me " on your cards, your contacts could likely get away with putting it on jigsaw without issues. But if it's a plain card given with the explicit purpose of you being contacted by this other person, your contact and jigsaw would be out of luck.
Don't assume that just because something is legal in the US, that it's legal everywhere else in the world:0 645460 649110 65609
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=196040&cid=16
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=196040&cid=16
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=196040&cid=16
It's too bad when the US talks about harmonizing IP laws, they mean that "the rest of the world adopts our bad laws or we adopt bad laws from other countries", and they don't mean that "the rest of the world adopts our good laws or we adopt good laws from other countries".
I guess it's true what they say about entropy.
Actually, Federal law restricts the use of the SSN to the Social Security program. All other uses are prohibited. Of course, absolutely everyone ignores this bit of regulation, including all levels of government.
There's a simple response to Jigsaw: just spam the database with invalid entries. Go there and type in as many made-up entries as you can. Or, better yet, write a sript to do it for you with randomly-generated names. Make the data useless to them because it has so many incorrect entries. Granted, that would take a lot of entries, but an automated system could do it pretty easily.
If they can break the "social contract" of keeping business card information semi-private, then we are perfectly within our rights to break the expectation that we will enter valid information. What's good for the goose, hoist them with their own petard, etc.
You are so right about the loss of privacy and the growing demand for sensitive customer data. In fact, Dark Reading just posted a comprehensive story on the black market for stolen data just last night: http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=103 198&WT.svl=news1_1
I was particularly surprised by the organization behind the criminals who buy the data, and the relatively low price they pay for it.
When I publish some text, like this comment you're reading, it's copyright protected by me automatically. You cannot copy it outside of the transaction in which you're receiving it, except for explicitly limited "fair use" exceptions (like storing it for retrieval by the same recipient), and of course any expressly permitted uses stated by me, the copyright holder.
Personal info, including contact info, must be covered by the same kind of protection from copying. To legally protect the kind of discretion and confidentiality we're all familiar with as simply "good manners".
Corporate info is heavily protected by our current government. "Pirates" and "leakers" routinely get prosecuted, fined, even jailed. Humans are second-class citizens in the copyright regime. We need a new copyright law that protects us at least as much as the corporations producing merely commercial data.
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make install -not war
Even though the company description of Jigsaw sounds nice and rewarding, other people have dramatically different opinions about what Jigsaw is doing.
g saw-data-following-privacy-standards/
Read More: http://techaddress.wordpress.com/2006/09/08/is-ji
I manage a 'sales' department for a HR agency, and this site is a recruiter's wet dream. Obviously this is no surprize, as such was the idea. I'm not sure if everyone knows (I imagine most people do) that its easy enough to get people's buisness contact info, even though most companies go through great lengths to hide the names of their employees from head hunters. The agency i work for, for example, has a databse of around 80k people. 80k is nothing compared to the ~4 million contacts already on that site, but the point is that recruitment agencies have been doing this for years - instead of buying contact info, they hire people to 'obtain' it. and instead of sharing that info w/ everyone, they each keep it in-house. Nothing revolutionary has been accomplished here, jigsaw has just opened up 'passive candidate sourcing' to the public (wiki-style) whereas it had previously been an isolated/privatized practice. Think of it this way: one recruitment agency has one database, another recruiter has another database, a 3rd agency has a 3rd database, etc etc...sure there might be some overlap (how much overlap would ofcourse depend on the agency's respective target industries) but all this information is already archived and searchable somewhere. Furthermore, the fact that jigsaw builds its database by 'buying' contact info is similarly meaningless. Recruitment agencies pay people to obtain contact info, jigsaw pays people to obtain contact info...the only difference is that jigsaw lets you do it 'freelance' lol.
It's called networking people. This same practice has been going on since the dawn of sales. A group of people with a similar customer base get together and share information to reduce their workload.
All over America, in Chambers of Commerce, Social Clubs and Grange Halls, people are gathering in the wee hours of the morning and trading your information. That's right folks, in PUBLIC! You thought your telcom guy was wonderful didn't you? Set up your whole office; you can even call your Shanghai office for next to nothing due to that nifty VOIP thing he hocked you. Well guess what: next Wednesday he's going to be handing out your contact information to his friends. Ever wondered why you always seem to get the most sales calls on Thursday? Now you know.
Obviously I'm being sarcastic; networking is part of the world. People are going to trade away your business information. Think about it: if a collegue of yours, someone you saw once a week every week, asked if you knew anyone at ABC Company, you'd give them that name. Now sure, you probably won't be giving them your brother/cousin/best friend's name, but someone who you know strictly on a business basis? It's not unethical, it's business.Jigsaw is not an evil entity, it is someone's clever idea to widen their network. In my opinion, it was a long time coming.
"By the time they had diminished from 50 to 8, the other dwarves began to suspect 'Hungry.'" -Gary Larson
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
i dont think that business cards can be clas as private..bcoz ther purpose of having business card itself to get spread far and wide business cards is a card on which are printed the person's name and business affliation including info like address and phone nmbr.. traditionally is just a printed paper,simple but it change now days depending on the business style itself.. but for sure it still have the same purposed..like during sales calls to provide potential customers with a means to contact the business or representative of the business.. somehow..there is CD ROM business cards that can hold more data..