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Saturday 24 October 2015

A neat way to acquire your personal data.

Here's a plan.

Set up a web site that says that it will do free credit monitoring.

Have a signup form that asks for name, address, birth date, email address and phone number.

Part two of the signup asks for your credit card number, and reassures you that it won't be charged, just used for identity verification.

If you're worried about it being a free service, and wonder how they're making money out of this, you get told "We receive a small commission from the product providers for any customer who uses our site and takes out a product". And guess what - their privacy policy lists five categories of companies that they'll give your data to.

This company looks legitimate, but wouldn't it be easy to set up a similar site that just acquired your information, then said "Sorry, you dno't qualify".

 TalkTalk are suggesting to their customers that they sign up for Noddle alerts. Normally, Noddle charges for this. Noddle is free if you use it by accessing their web site. TalkTalk say that if you give the code TT231 then you'll get 12 months of free alerts.

Well, sorry Noddle. I'm not willing to fix a theft of my personal information, by giving away more of my personal information. Sorry TalkTalk, fixing your blunder doesn't mean giving away a service that was already mostly free.

And I expect I'll soon be getting a bunch of spams purporting to come from TalkTalk and trying to scam me into giving away more info, or money. Well, I'm already set up for dealing with this.

And, by the way, I'm in the middle of getting additional services from TalkTalk, and I need to phone them on Monday. That conversation might get interesting!

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