1-800-454-9078

Update: Looks like it really was Chase who called me. Damn phishers making everyone paranoid.

Today I've received two calls on my cellphone supposedly from 1-800-454-9078.

The automated call claims to be from Fraud Center at Chase and is asking me to verify information regarding my Chase PriorityClub credit card. The caller has my cellphone number and the last four digits of my credit card. I can only imagine what the caller wants to do with the data.

I use this credit card very seldom. In fact, I haven't used it for months before yesterday. Someone, somewhere swiped my credit card information yesterday. Very interesting. I used the credit card on two online stores yesterday. Both supposedly VERY reputable. Either they, their credit card processing company of my PC have been hacked.

I don't think it's my PC, because I make purchases from it using other credit cards all the time, and I haven't received similar phonecalls about my other credit cards before.

Let's see what kind of payments will start appearing on my credit card this week.

-TPP

AT&T to customers: Fuck your privacy

AT&T gets sued for violating their own privacy policy and disclosing confidential information about their customers and their usage records to 3rd parties.

What does AT&T do to rectify the situation? Apologize and vow to protect customers' privacy better in the future? Naah, that wouldn't be Big Corp ^(tm) enough.

Instead AT&T rewrites its privacy policy to state, in no uncertain terms, that AT&T customers have no privacy whatsoever and AT&T can do whatever the hell they please with your data. Excellent!

Customers to AT&T: No. Fuck you.

-TPP

In Soviet US the Government spies on you, pt II

USA Today has managed to find out more about NSA's domestic spying program.

Turns out our fearless leader, Chairman George Bush, lied to us again. In his radio address last December he said he'd authorized the NSA to capture international communication between terrorist suspects. He specifically said only international communication, i.e. calls coming in from abroad or going abroad, are spied on, as if that makes spying on your own citizens any better. He also implied that the spying program was only listening in on terrorist suspects.

Either his definition of terrorist suspect is a little vague, and includes every US resident, NSA went outside of their mandate or Bush is lying through his teeth.

As the USA Today information reveals the NSA has been collecting information about EVERY phonecall made in the United States. All calls. Not just international calls or calls made or received by terrorist suspects. Every single call.

With the help of telecommunications companies the NSA has been collecting information about US residents' phonecalls for years. Citing legal implications only QWest has refused to comply with NSA's request to hand over call information. AT&T, Verizon and Bellsouth are happily letting the Government spy on you with no warrants in sight.

When will the Government stop lying to you? After the next election?

-TPP

Aetna stores your data on laptops

Yet another data theft, and yet another company that's completely failed to protect your confidential information.

Will Aetna get in trouble for this as they should? Of course not, just like with any other company that mishandles your data, there will be no consequences to Aetna, except a little egg in their face.

-TPP

EFF sues AT&T for illegal wiretapping

EFF has filed a class action lawsuit against AT&T claiming AT&T has been secretly, and illegally, giving NSA access to all of AT&T's cellphone calls data and all Internet traffic flowing through its networks.

Of note about this is that the Internet traffic flowing through AT&T's networks is not necessarily sent from or to AT&T, as AT&T operates one of the backbone networks that route traffic from provider to provider. Essentially this means that the NSA has been illegally wiretapping, with AT&T's active participation, a large percentage of all Internet traffic in the United States.

Update: Here's some information about exactly what the NSA is listening. Great stuff.

-TPP

IRS to allow selling your data

And just the other day I wrote about credit bureaus selling your data to everyone and their dogs.

Here we have the IRS suggesting relaxing the rules that tax preparers live by when they're preparing your federal tax returns. The suggested change in rules would allow the tax preparers to sell data to data brokers, but also protect your data by allowing consumers to opt-out from sending your tax documents to be prepared offshore.

Wonderful rule change. Protectionism - yes, that very same thing George Bush said never works in his last State of the Union address, I guess the memo didn't quite make it to IRS - and relaxed data privacy regulations in the same package.

I wish I could say I'm making this shit up.

-TPP

Privacy? There is no such thing.

The Realty Times article reveals how credit bureaus (Experian, Equifax, Transunion) are selling your fresh mortgage application data within 24 hours of your you filing a mortgage application with a bank.

They're selling the information to mortage lenders with your phone number, credit score, what kind of a mortgage you applied for and everything else they know about you. Equifax will probably also sell your email address with the data, too, considering they do e-pending for other clients as well.

There is no way for consumers to opt out and there is no way to know where your data ends up. Why would phishers and other criminals even bother with cracking when they could just pretend to be a mortgage lender and legally (!!!!!) buy your information for peanuts. The information would be much more uptodate, i.e. valuable as well. You bet the information is resold to anyone who pays for it. The possibilities for misuse are huge.

Some mortgage brokers are very upset about this practise, because the credit bureaus are basically selling their mortgage leads to their competitors. Some suggest the practise is a violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Personally I say the data brokers should be shut down by law, but we know that's never going to happen considering the way the US legislators work. At the very least the data brokers should be tightly regulated and completely permission based, meaning not one bit of your data transfers hands unless you specifically allowed it. This wild west mentality towards your financial and other information is exactly why we have the widespread phishing problem.

I'm in the process of applying for a mortgage at the moment. If I get unsolicited calls from mortgage brokers, after applying for one, that'll be one interesting phonecall. Anyone with ideas how to most effectively f*** with anyone that calls me, leave a comment or send me an email.

-TPP

MPAA stormtroopers invade movie theaters, in Canada

Movie reviewers watching a prescreening of Derailed in Toronto are subjected to detention center type of security procedures before entering the movie theatre. Security guards also record the audience for duration of the screening. Can't wait to go see movies! Maybe they'll give me a strip search next time.

-TPP

Up yours, spammer scum pt II

Scott Levine, the scum behind spam empire snipermail.com, was convicted on 120 counts of unauthorized access to data, two counts of access device fraud and one count of obstruction of justice. He and his employees stole 1.6 billion customer records from Acxiom, a company whose business is to violate people's privacy, and used the data to spam and inflate the size of snipermail.com's contact database to make snipermail.com more attractive to buyers.

Maximum sentence is 640 years in prison and about $30M in fines.

Let's hope the people sentencing him were victims of his spams.

The only negative side to the story is that Axciom, once again, gets away with basically peeing on people's online privacy.

-TPP

Privacy is in the eyes of the beholder

There's been some interesting debate recently on whether or not police can search your garbage without a search warrant. Apparently the police, district attorneys and judges think they can. They seem to believe since that stuff is put there to be discarded and people know it's going to be handled by sanitation workers and even sorted for recycling there is no expectation of privacy, so it's ok for the police to search it without a search warrant. And they routinely do.

Journalists of the Willamette Week newspaper in Portland, OR decided they'd exercise their rights to search this public depository of personal information by going dumpster diving in the Police Chief's, the Mayor's and the District Attorney's garbage cans.

They then went to said persons asking whether it was ok to search garbage. All of them said yes...until the reporters told them they had gone through their own garbage. How the tables suddenly turned.

The Police Chief was so upset he cut the reporters off midsentence and stopped the interview. The Mayor summoned the reporters to her office and nearly arrested them on the spot. The District Attorney, however, was playing the "hahhah, it's funny" game and apparently wasn't upset at all.

-TPP

Good riddance to bad rubbish

Visa has decided to ban CardSystems Solutions from processing transactions for visa credit cards. Banks using CardSystems Solutions to process visa card transactions have been given till October to find another payment processor.

Eeeexcellent.

-TPP

The state of data privacy in the United States

A hacker gains access to a payment processing system and installed a trojan in the system that listened to credit card transactions. MasterCard reports "More than 40 million credit cards may have been breached."

Good thing the financial institutions are keeping our financial information secure these days, though. It's not like this sort of thing happens every week...oh, wait, but it does.

-TPP

More legislation to fight online fraud is good, right? Wrong.

The House of Representatives approved a bill that would jail felons even longer, if they used fraudulent information when registering a domainname used in committing the felony. Wow, that's great.

When you register a domain name, there's two pieces of information you give to the registrar. The billing information for payment, and the contact information displayed publicly in your domain's whois records. The bill would make it a felony to falsify the publicly displayed whois records information.

There's a whole bunch of things wrong with this.

If you falsify the payment information, that's already a crime. The registration is usually paid with a credit card, and if you falsify that information you commit credit card fraud. If you use a stolen credit card, you get a few additional felonies tacked on top of credit card fraud charges. You could therefore charge the criminals on existing laws already making this new bill redundant.

The bill is worded in such a manner that falsifying the publicly displayed whois record information is not a crime, unless you use the domain as part of committing a felony. Considering that copyright violations these days appear to be felonies, under certain circumstances, by having an outdated address, your parents' address or by some other means having your whois record information false, you've just tacked a few years on top of your copyright violation felony. The Church of Scientology, RIAA and MPAA have been very aggressive in pursuing copyright violators online. Heaven forbid any of them operate a website with fraudulent whois records.

The penalty for this horrible crime is up to 7 years in jail. Gee whiz, I'd be better off selling crack.

-TPP

Airlines ordered to hand over passenger data to TSA

TSA is asking airlines to hand over passenger data for all passengers that flew on domestic flights this June. It's certainly nice of them to make the request public this time. However, they're not asking as much as demanding the data.

If you took a domestic flight during June, now would be a good time to contact the airline and "ask" them not to hand over your information.

-TPP

You have no privacy

The sorry state of privacy in the United States is once again demonstrated by the US Department of Transportation dismissing a complaint against Northwest Airlines. Northwest Airlines was one of the airlines supplying the US Government with passanger data, against their stated policies and expectations of their customers, to help "fight the War On Terrorism".

Do you know who is using your information and how?

-TPP