Your Secrets Are My Business

Your Secrets are My Business, Kevin McKeown, Plume Books, 2000

Many books have been written about how to protect one�s privacy and personal information. This one comes from an investigator and security advisor who has spent the last 20 years getting all sorts of information for Hollywood celebrities and Fortune 500 companies.

Personal privacy involves much more than just computers and the internet. Don't leave outgoing mail in your mailbox to be picked up, especially if the mailbox is near the street. Hand it to a carrier or get it to a post office. Buy, and use, a home shredder, but make it a crosscut shredder, not one of those that cuts your documents into nice, easy-to-reconstruct strips. There is no illusion of privacy once you throw that bank statement or credit card receipt in the trash. Even at the dump, if a person knows where to look, and is sufficiently motivated, they can find it. There is also no illusion of privacy when talking on a cellphone in public. If a person isn't listening in electronically, then the person right behind you can hear everything you say, so why are you talking about personal financial matters in public?

Have you thought about leaving an envelope or package in your car with the name and address showing? Without doing anything, a thief or scam artist now knows where you live. From there, it is a short distance to applying for a new credit card in your name, or getting a new driver's license or Social Security number, or something equally unpleasant. Make sensitive phone calls from random pay phones. Disable your work phone's redial mechanism by picking up the phone, waiting for a dial tone, pressing any number, and hanging up. Be very wary about giving out personal information over the phone, regardless of the reason given by the caller. The only way to make totally and absolutely sure that an incriminating email or document is really gone from your computer is to take the disk or hard drive on which it was stored, and smash it into many pieces. No matter how many times you Erase or Delete something, it can be retrieved.

After reading this book, it would be really easy to become a paranoid hermit, refusing to go anywhere or do anything. The author's intention is not to spread fear, but awareness. It is not possible to completely plug all ID "holes," but there are many things that anyone can do to make a potential thief go elsewhere. This book
is well worth reading, more than once.