SmallNetBuilder

A Wealth Of Data For The Taking

People surfing the net leave an incredible amount of personal information and profiling data around. This includes information about pages that they read, parameters they use to search, what they buy and download, places they visit, emails they receive and send, and people they chat with. The management and employees of an Internet Service Provider (ISP) have the potential to reap a huge amount of personal data if they were to violate their users' privacy.

Shopping online? The merchant site has the user's name and address details, and (usually) other marketing data from small questionnaires that are innocuously answered. That also includes all sites that are part of the online shop and delivery service.

And then there is the matter of the employees in the payment gateways, who verify credit card details. Another issue is the employees of the bank, who handle connection details, the administrators and staff that manage the bank's databases, and handle customer queries on accounts.

Combine so much data with personal identity management details, and it is actually possible to comprehensively steal the identity of an active online user. Considering the number of people who potentially have access to sensitive information, and you can see that this is a truly daunting challenge.