Your personal data, just ready for the taking

Senator Ted Stevens, from Alaska, instructed his staff to see if they could steal his identity; he had been concerned with how the Internet could make private lives an open book. Tom Zeller, Jr., has an article in today's NYT about how easy it is to find personal data online. As he writes,

His staff, Mr. Stevens reported, had come back not just with digital breadcrumbs on the senator, but also with insights on his daughter's rental property and some of the comings and goings of his son, a student in California. "For $65 they were told they could get my Social Security number," he said.

Not good.

Forty-one graduate students at Johns Hopkins University became mini-data-miners recently as part of a computer security course. Even they were suprised by how easy it was to look up data on people.

"I think what this professor and students have done is a powerful object lesson in just how much information there is to be found about most of us online," said Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego, "and how difficult it is, how impossible it is, to control what's done with our information."

Indeed. The information by itself, in individual bits, can be fairly innocuous, but put it all together in one nice neat little package, and... well, all it takes is one unscrupulous individual!