How Secure Is Your Online Identity?

How anonymous are you online? As recent events in Canada have shown, a court can order Google to hand over your details that you believed to be private. Nor is the Canadian example an isolated case.

In the Canadian example a court ordered Google to turn over the identities of anonymous Gmail users who had accused York University faculty members of lying about their scholarly credentials.

“People need to know that very little information that they give or make available to third parties [like Google] is unavailable to the government or private litigants,” says Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law. “I think most people are surprised at how relatively easy it is for the government and private litigants to obtain ‘their’ information.”

Court obtained Google search have been used in convictions that included murder. Your details are only a subpoena away.

However, if I am a law abiding citizen with no fear of litigation should I worry?

Generally, telecommunications, health and financial institutions usually consider information that identifies a person as more sensitive than other information. However, many innocuous, neutral, or common facts can potentially identify you.

Professor Paul Ohm of the University of Colorado Law School, in his paper, “Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization“, pointed out that computer scientists “can often ‘re-identify’ or ‘deanonymize’ individuals hidden in anonymized data with astonishing ease.”

Statistical inference can be used to extrapolate demographic data, your search terms,  purchase habits; preferences or opinions about music, books, or movies; and the structure of your social networks. As there are so many sources of data about us it can be easy to narrow data down to one person.

The distinction between personally-identifiable information” and “non-personally-identifiable information” is becoming harder to distinguish. In fact, combination of gender, postcode, and birthdate) is unique for 87% of the population.

“It was found that 87% (216 million of 248 million) of the population in the United States had reported characteristics that likely made them unique based only on {5-digit ZIP, gender, date of birth}“ stated L. Sweeney of Carnegie Mellon University.

“About half of the U.S. population (132 million of 248 million or 53%) are likely to be uniquely identified by only {place, gender, date of birth}, where place is basically the city, town, or municipality in which the person resides. And even at the county level, {county, gender, date of birth} are likely to uniquely identify 18% of the U.S. population.”

As many people use pet names for user names, some scams have asked apparently innocuous questions such as per name and street address and being able to obtain identifiable account information.

The world’s best security is useless if a fraudster had your account details.  So what is a strong password?

Unfortunately, too many passwords are easy to guess. The passwords password1, abc123, myspace1, password, blink182 have been doing the rounds of popularity.

A good password combines upper and lower case, letters, numbers and keyboard symbols.  A good password does NOT include the users name, company or user name, football team, spouse name or plane words that a program could extrapolate by going through the dictionary.

Use Microsoft’s Password Checker to test out different passwords and see which ones work for you.

It’s advisable to change your password regularly.

If you use the same password for all your sites, all your accounts are at risk if a hacker works out one account.