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48
Morse was a victim of the worst kind of privacy violation - the theft of his identity.
(2)________ All it takes is your name and your Social Security number, and your
identity can be plucked from you easier than a coat from a closet. With Social
Security numbers being used as account identifiers by financial-service firms,
health ; care companies and motor vehicle departments- all of which are going
online - it is becoming easier for impostors to put on your happy face. (3)______
Peter Neumann of the R&D firm SRI International calls identity theft the "hidden
down side of computing."
3
The advent of e-commerce is inadvertently endangering privacy. Companies have
long boasted about the efficiency, convenience and personalized service that
distinguish commerce online. (4)______ For starters, they know who their
customers are, where they live and their credit-card numbers. And the more
someone buys, the more the seller finds out about him: he likes bourbon and
trash novels; sends someone not his wife flowers every Wednesday. Any Web-
site operator can reconstruct a visitor's every move on his site: what pages he
viewed, what information he entered and the Internet service he uses. (5)______
4
Getting your identity stolen online isn't as unusual as you might think. Three
weeks ago John Aravosis, a Washington, D.C., Internet consultant, logged onto
AOL* and found an e-mail warning that his account was involved in criminal
activity in certain chat rooms. Realizing someone had been logging into his
account, he wanted to make sure AOL knew it wasn't him in the event any records
became public. (6)______ Ultimately, he found out that the "criminal" activity was
software piracy, and he's still waiting for a letter from AOL that clears his name.
5
Aravosis says he never gave out his password, nor did he download a malicious
program, but AOL staffers suspect he did. Using AOL's Instant Messenger
service, online cons can send a user a missive posing as an AOL employee who
needs the user's password for some reason or another. "We are experiencing
difficulties with our records... I need you to verify your logon password to me so
that I can validate you as a user." Thus, you can become the unwitting victim of a
"Trojan horse" program -an innocuously named e-mail attachment that stores your
password when you open it. (7) _________
6
So you have to be digitally vigilant. Guard your Social Security number as if it
were the master key to your life, which it is. And plead with your insurance
company and financial institution not to use the number as your account ID (good
luck).
7
Paranoid, maybe, but it could have saved William Bergau. In May 1998 the 35-
year-old college recruiter and his wife had their wallets stolen from their car and
returned the next day. But the thief kept checks and Bergau's Social Security
card, which he used to obtain a fraudulent driver's license by telling he had lost
the original. But the real problem hit Bergau when the pretender started getting
arrested, under Bergau's name, for drunken driving, marijuana possession and
grand-theft auto. A year after the theft, when Bergau was on vacation with his wife
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