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Protecting Your Identity. Here are some good tips for protecting your privacy in both the virtual and physical worlds. I'm pretty cautious about these things but there are a couple of ideas here I hadn't considered, so I figured this list was worth mentioning. I've reposted it in its entirety from Phil's weblog.

Tips for Protecting Your Identity. Much is made of the potential for identity theft in online transactions, but the truth is that the vast majority occurs due to meat-space activities that are much simpler to pull off. I ran across a set of ideas on how to protect your identity and thought they'd be good to record. Some of them are obvious, at least to me, but they probably aren't to everyone. I don't know who the author was. Here they are, edited and augmented by me:

• When you are writing checks to pay on your credit card accounts, do not put the complete account number on the "For" line. Instead, just put the last four numbers. The credit card company knows the rest of the number and anyone who might be handling your check as it passes through all the check processing channels won't have access to it.  This is more difficult to do if you use Quicken or some other electronic bill paying mechanism. I've often wished the credit card companies would give me a separate account number from my credit card number.
• Put your work or cell phone number on your checks instead of your home phone. If you have a PO Box use that instead of your home address. Never have your Social Security Number printed on your checks.
• Shred bills, credit offers, bank statements and other correspondence that may contain personally identifying information. This keeps people from rummaging through your trash to gather information that may come in handy for stealing your identity.
• Mail bills and anything else that contains a check or account numbers in a drop box rather than leaving it in your mailbox for the mailman to pick up. Even better, start paying your bills electronically. This prevents thieves from stealing your outgoing mail and using the checks or account numbers.
• Photocopy the important items from your wallet, remembering to get both sides of each license, credit card, etc. Keep the photocopies in a safe place. You will know what you had in your wallet and all of the account numbers and phone numbers to call and cancel.  make sure you have those phone numbers with this information.
• I also carry a photocopy of my passport when I travel either here or abroad. Its probably not a bad idea to keep a photocopy of your driver's license with you when you travel as well in case it gets lost. You might be able to get on a plane and get home with it.
• If your wallet is stolen, its important to cancel your credit cards immediately and notify your DMV and the Social Security administration (if you carry your Social Security card in your wallet---I do not for obvious reasons).
• If your wallet or purse is stolen, file a police report immediately in the jurisdiction where it was stolen, this proves to credit providers you were diligent, and is a first step toward an investigation. There likely won't be one, but you established a record nonetheless.  
• Call the three national credit reporting organizations immediately to place a fraud alert on your name and Social Security number. The alert will notify any company that checks your credit that your information was stolen and they have to contact you by phone to authorize new credit. This will keep thieves from opening new numbers in your name, signing up for cell service, etc. It can stop them in their tracks. The numbers are:
  • Equifax: 1-800-525-6285
  • Experian (formerly TRW): 1-888-397-3742
  • Trans Union: 1-800-680-7289
  • Social Security Administration (fraud line):  1-800-269-0271
• Keep copies of all your correspondence with credit card companies. credit reporting agencies, and the government after your information is stolen.

[Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

[b.cognosco]

An ounce of prevention... Very good stuff to keep in mind when doing simple things like writing a check to pay off your credit card...

Paolo and I are pleased to announce the release of the first public draft of the Easy News Topics (ENT) specification.  ENT1.0 is an RSS2.0 module designed to make it really easy to incorporate topics into RSS feeds.  Why would you want to do that?  Because it will help to enable a raft of new, smarter, aggregator products.

RSS has become very important to a lot of us and we are starting to see its penetration into the business world as well.  We think that integrating topics will help aggregators applications to scale to meet the future needs of users as well as delivering some very powerful applications.  I've spoken before about the kinds of thing I want my aggregator to do:

• group posts from many feeds by interest.
• filtering posts I don't want to see
• scoring & promote posts
• recombe different feeds dynamically.

I hope that ENT might help bring all these things a little closer.  We also see a role for classification in bringing new ways to order, view, and, search weblog data.

We are offering ENT1.0 to the community (under a Creative Commons License) in the hope that we can foster these applications and many more, that we haven't even begun to think of yet.

I will soon be releasing to the public the next version of liveTopics which will be ENT compliant.  At that point any Radio user will be able to easily add topic metadata to their RSS feed.  We hope that there will soon be many applications available to make use of it.

We look forward to your comments.

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

Alright.... more forward movement in blogdom from Evectors and Matt Mower