Most who read this blog know my identity was stolen and abused by an individual familliar with my personal information. That information was used to break into my bank accounts, credit card accounts, etc. I spent countless hours with police, my bank and the FTC, as well as thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees attempting to re-secure my privacy.
An individual who abuses your private information is one facet of an epedemic of privacy issues. The other is that private information is far too easy to access. A San Diego company called ProQuo is working towards ensuring your personal information is not running rampant across a thousand database without your knowledge. It’s free, and you should sign up for it.
Credit reporting agencies (CRAs) know a lot (understatement) about each of us. And they are horrible at keeping secrets. Information about your payment histories from creditors flows into their databases each month. And at the same time, information about you, your purchases, your ability to pay on new debt, and so on - is packaged up and flows right back out to credit card providers, mortgage providers, catalog publishers, phone companies, and so on. They, in turn, send you email, direct mail, promotions, text messages, and so on to sell more products and services. CRA’s are the world’s biggest revolving door to your privacy (or lack thereof). Most of this I learned about when filing the police report for my own occurrance of identity theft.
Back to ProQuo. This company acts as a portal to request and inform CRAs and other companies collecting and selling your personal information to stop doing so. These include coupon providers, direct marketing agencies, credit card issuers, catalog companies…the…list…is…very…long. Some requests can be done online. Some require requests to be sent in writing, and ProQuo has a neat utility for populating those forms to fax or mail to the individual entities. It took me about two hours to filter through all the different companies and process my requets. But in doing so, and learning all the companies using my information for marketing purposes, I came across something even more alarming….
One direct marketing provider happens to know my cell phone number. I never gave it to them. In their same database, they have used other promotional offers I did request from various entities to corrolate my cell phone number to other information (email address, home address, presumed income(?), etc.) As I was going through their site, attempting to remove myself from further communication, I came across a surprising data point: The latitude and longitude of where I am. Right now. Provided by none other than AT&T, using triangulation of signals my cell phone is transmitting.
I’m just trying to figure out what they would market to me when I’m at 47.614LAT and -122.322LON.
