MyCRA Specialist Credit Repair Lawyers

Tag: privacy

  • MyCRA Partners Privacy Awareness Week 2012

    MyCRA Credit Rating Repairs is proud to be a Privacy Awareness Week (PAW) Partner for 2012 which runs 29 April to 5 May.  The team at MyCRA hope we can help educate more people on Privacy Issues this week and in doing so reduce the numbers of identity theft cases in Australia. Privacy of your personal information is crucial to prevent identity theft and subsequent credit fraud. This week, through information provided by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) and also through our own information, we want to help clarify how Privacy (or lack of it) can affect your credit file and promote safety of your valuable personal information.

    This post features a newsletter titled “Privacy It’s All About You” provided by the OAIC which will clarify the origins of PAW and the importance of Privacy in your business, your life and for maintaining your good credit history. Please find full newsletter below:

    Privacy: it’s all about you

    Privacy Awareness Week (29 April – 5 May) is an annual event during which the Asia Pacific Privacy Authorities join forces to remind everyone to take steps to protect their own privacy and safeguard personal information about others that they might hold.

    “Privacy is recognised in many countries, including Australia, as a human right,” says Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim. “Serious consequences can arise when someone’s privacy is breached and we all have responsibilities to look after the personal information we handle.”

    Organisations and government agencies covered by the Privacy Act must meet responsibilities when collecting, using and disclosing personal information. This includes giving sufficient notice about why personal information is being collected and how it will be used and disclosed.

    Businesses covered by the Privacy Act are subject to ten National Privacy Principles or NPPs while most Australian, ACT and Norfolk Island government agencies must comply with eleven Information Privacy Principles or IPPs.

    Quick privacy tips for business and government agencies:

    • Don’t collect personal information that is unnecessary for your business
    • If you do need to collect people’s personal information, tell them why you are doing this, what the information will be used    for and how long it will be kept
    • Make it clear who will have access to that personal information, including any third parties
    • Take steps to destroy or de-identify personal information that is no longer required, subject to other record keeping    requirements.

    What about you?

    When it comes to protecting your own information, Mr Pilgrim is urging all Australians to be increasingly more vigilant about protecting their information.

    “You really need to pay attention to what information you are sharing and how it may be used, particularly online and when using smartphones, where personal information is routinely collected and stored by any number of entities.”

    Mr Pilgrim says people tend not to think about what information they are giving away or what will happen to it, especially as they make quick transactions online.

    Know what’s going on

    When your online search history is aggregated with other information you may have shared online, a detailed picture emerges that could compromise your privacy.

    Most search engines today track and store details about your browsing habits to help guide you to the information you are seeking. But Mr Pilgrim says that many of us remain unaware of how this happens or where our information may end up.

    “Find out how your information is being used by checking the privacy policy of the search engines you use.  If you want more control, look for options that allow you to prevent aggregation and keep information you post across various accounts separate.”

    Different search engines operate in different ways.  So if you are unhappy with the way your information is being used by one provider, consider using another.

    “I’d encourage people to always use the provider that offers them most control about how their personal information is used,” Mr Pilgrim added.

    Similar issues apply to apps: when you download them, you usually agree to your personal information being collected in some way.

    “Next time you decide to download an app, take a moment to look at the terms and conditions that set out what you are signing up for, what type of information the app developer is collecting and how it will be used.”

    While these kinds of details can be buried in the fine print, Mr Pilgrim says it’s worth making the effort to know and understand what you are agreeing to so your information is not used in unexpected ways.

    “Just as in the real world, if you want to safeguard your privacy, you need to pay attention to what information you are handing over and ask companies what they are doing with it.”

    Find out more at www.privacyawarenessweek.org/oaic

    Stay tuned for more information on Privacy, your personal information and your credit file.

    If you think you may be a victim of identity theft, firstly contact Police who will assist you.

    If identity theft has affected your credit file (credit fraud) and you need help with removing negative listings such as defaults and clearouts which should not be there, it might be helpful to contact a credit rating repairer to go through your options for credit rating repair.

    Graham Doessel, Founder and CEO of My CRA Credit Rating Repairs and www.fixmybadcredit.com.au.

    Image: suphakit73 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

  • Facebook users should be wary of new Timeline feature

    Security of people’s personal information on Facebook is again under the spotlight since the announcement of Facebook’s new ‘Timeline’ feature which tracks the digital history of its users, charting their online activity.

    And in a shock revelation today Australian technologist, Nik Cubrilovic has revealed this tracking actually continues even after the user has logged out. Cubrilovic says tests he has conducted show that:

    “when users log out of Facebook, rather than deleting its tracking cookies, the site merely modifies them, maintaining account information and other unique tokens that can be used to identify users,” his blog says.

    An article in The Australian last week titled Every click you make, Facebook tracker will be watching you featured Australian Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim. He issued a warning to consumers on about the introduction of this new feature, and its privacy implications.

    “I would strongly encourage people using social networking sites to make sure they know what information may be made publicly available on that site and to think carefully about the information they are sharing and who might have access to it,” Mr Pilgrim said.

    With the new information that has come to light today, it would seem even more important for Facebook users to exercise caution around this new system.

    The discovery is featured in The Sydney Morning Herald’s story Facebook tracks you even after logging out. The article quotes David Vaile, executive director of UNSW’s Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre. He says Facebook’s changes were a ”breathtaking and audacious grab for whole life data”. In an email interview he accused the social networking site of attempting to ”normalise gross and unsafe overexposure”.

    ”While initially opt-in, the default then seems to be expose everything, and Facebook have form in the past for lowering protection after people get used to a certain level of initial protection – bait and switch,” he said.

    Cubrilovic says he has been sitting on this information for over a year, despite notifying Facebook of his discovery at the time. He says the recent introduction and media coverage of the Timeline feature has prompted him to reveal his findings.

    Although there has been no ‘official’ response to media to date in response to the issue, a couple of engineers who work for Facebook have denied allegations they track cookies.

    “I am a Facebook engineer that works on these systems and I wanted to say that the logged out cookies are used for safety and protection including: identifying spammers and phishers, detecting when somebody unauthorized is trying to access your account, helping you get back into your account if you get hacked, disabling registration for a under-age users who try to re-register with a different birthdate, powering account security features such as 2nd factor login approvals and notification, and identifying shared computers to discourage the use of “keep me logged in.”

    Also please know that also when you’re logged in (or out) we don’t use our cookies to track you on social plugins to target ads or sell your information to third parties. I’ve heard from so many that what we do is to share or sell your data, and that is just not true. We use your logged in cookies to personalize (show you what your friends liked), to help maintain and improve what we do, or for safety and protection,” the engineer writes to Emil Protalinski for ZD Net.

    Identity theft can be devastating for the victim, and many times they face an uphill battle with their credit rating following it. If the crime is sophisticated – the virtual stealing of someone’s good name can go undetected for a significant time. Often it is not until the victim applies for credit somewhere and is refused that they realise their personal information has been stolen and identity fraud has been committed against them. People may have credit applications as a minimum and possibly defaults, mortgages and mobile phones attributed to them incorrectly.

    Once any account remains unpaid past 60 days, the debt may be listed by the creditor as a default on a person’s credit file. Under current Australian legislation, defaults remain listed on the victim’s credit file for a 5 year period.

    What is not widely known is how difficult recovery from identity theft can be. Unfortunately there is no guarantee defaults can be removed from a person’s credit file. The onus is on the identity theft victim to prove to creditors they didn’t initiate the debts in order to succeed with the credit repair. But for the victim who is virtually robbed of their financial freedom, it is a point worth fighting for.

    Signs which may alert people to possible identity theft:

    – Money missing from bank account/s
    – Suspicious entries on credit card statements or bank statements.
    – Statements for strange accounts.
    – Missing mail such as bank statements or Centrelink statements.
    – Credit refused somewhere.
    – Mail about new credit applications.

    For more information on identity theft, or for help with credit repair following identity theft, visit the MyCRA Credit Repairs website.

    Image: jscreationzs/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

     

  • Is Facebook’s face recognition putting your privacy at risk?

    German officials have been quick to protect citizens against possible invasions of privacy and identity theft . Last week they met with Facebook to demand policy change to its biometric function.

    Facebook agreed to a voluntary code of conduct to protect its users’ data. The issue was over Facebook’s facial recognition function, which it has been using since December last year. The function catalogues the faces of users, making ‘tag’ suggestions automatically.

    Technology commentators CIO published the story ‘Facebook bows to stricter German culture’:

    “A few weeks ago, the State of Schleswig-Holstein had ordered all state sites to remove Facebook’s “like” button, and threatened to impose hefty fines on those that didn’t. It said Facebook builds profiles of users and non-users alike with the “like” button’s data, which violates German law.
    And in early August the head of the German data protection authority asked Facebook to disable its facial recognition feature and argued that facial recognition amounts to unauthorized data collection on individuals.

    “It’s obvious that this makes people very nervous when it comes to privacy,” said Carsten Casper, a Gartner privacy analyst, reports the BBC.

    The code of conduct agreement was announced after Richard Allan, Facebook’s director of European public policy, met last week with Germany’s Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich in Berlin and a state parliamentary committee in Kiel, according to ZDNet.

    “With Facebook’s willingness to sign up for this self-regulation … the debate over the extent to which German data protection law applies to Facebook has been considerably defused,” the Interior Ministry said, according to German news website The Local.

    What is interesting, is that no other countries have found this function to be a threat to privacy. Or the framework of privacy laws in other countries may not exist to prevent its use.

    Back in June there were concerns over the potential privacy dangers of the introduction of face recognition technology to Facebook. This comes from an article from The Wall Street Journal for The Australian:

    The technology also raises concerns that Facebook has built a potentially sensitive database of its more than 600 million users based on their facial characteristics, even as other tech titans such as Google say they’ve stopped short of adding facial recognition to some of their services.

    “Facebook users thought they were simply tagging their friends. Turns out Facebook was building an image profile database to automate online identification,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre, a privacy group based in Washington.

    In a statement, Facebook said it “should have been more clear with people during the roll-out process when this became available to them.”

    Personal information is a valuable commodity these days. The Australian Crime Commission cites identity theft as the fastest growing crime in Australia and much of it is about profile building and data gathering in order to commit identity fraud against unknowing victims, often in other countries.

    And it is ordinary people that are most at risk of identity theft and a subsequent bad credit rating. Commentator Stilgherrian recently shared these insights into identity theft:

    Or, in the case of identity theft, when someone takes out $50,000 of loans in your name? That happens through the gradual accumulation of personal data. Your name and email address from a list stolen from a hacked website, cross-matched with your street address from another, your date of birth from a third, and so on.

    These databases can contain millions of people’s details. They’re traded in shady online markets where people buy the pieces missing from the databases they already have, merge them, refine them, mark ‘em up and sell ‘em on until eventually there’s enough to turn it all into a credit application. It’s then laundered though “money mules”, people recruited in the belief they’re making money at home with just a computer.

    Is facial recognition just the missing piece of the puzzle scammers need to completely annihilate their victims’ lives?

    How to avoid identity theft

    Public education can go a long way to lessening the instances of identity theft. The Government’s Stay Smart Online website recommends Australians follow these 8 top tips for increasing their resistance to identity fraud, and avoiding the loss to their bank balance and potentially their good credit rating:

    1. Install and renew your security software and set it to scan regularly.
    2. Turn on automatic updates on all your software, including
    your operating system and other applications.
    3. Think carefully before you click on links or attachments, particularly in emails and on social networking sites.
    4. Regularly adjust your privacy settings on social networking sites.
    5. Report or talk to someone about anything online that makes you feel uncomfortable or threatened – download the government’s Cybersafety Help Button.
    6. Stop and think before you post any photos or financial or personal information about yourself, your friends or family.
    7. Use strong passwords and change them at least twice a year.
    8. Talk within your family about good online safety.

    Where to go for help following identity theft

    Sometimes unravelling the tangled ‘web’ of online identity fraud for the purposes of negotiating with creditors to restore someone’s good credit rating is a minefield that many individuals have neither the time nor the skill set for.

    Credit repairers are more commonly involved in assisting people in cases of identity fraud due to a better knowledge of legislation and ability to work within it when negotiating with creditors over the victim’s financial future and to clear their credit file.

    For more information on identity theft and help with clearing your credit file, contact MyCRA Credit Repairs or call tollfree 1300 667 218.

    Image: Salvatore Vuono/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net