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"What data disaster do 50 million people have in common?" That question, posed by Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, stumped the delegates at the 15th annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference (CFP.)
These are people who live and breathe computer technology, high-tech law and privacy policy. Fortunately, Dixon quickly supplied the answer: "They've posted their resumes online. This opens them up to having their personal information sold, shared, merged and archived," she added. "There are spiders that go out there and suck in resumes from everywhere."
Spidering is using automated search techniques to take information from websites and databases.
Dixon proudly displayed a document from the evidence in a U.S. court case. It's an invoice from HotResumes.com that she said demonstrates that resumes of unsuspecting people "are being stolen from websites and sold on the open market."
Even more depressing, the going rate for your whole life on a piece of paper is 30 to 50 cents US. There's no regulation, and national borders make no difference to the resume collectors. "It's really the Wild West," says Dixon.
"You post your resume and it gets sold to your current employer," she says. "Bang, you're fired.”
Other dangers include having outdated information in circulation, or the inclusion of facts you no longer wish to disclose. She says that in the early days of the Internet, many people got jobs from online postings because "they were ahead of the curve."
In fact, Dixon wrote the first book on how to hunt for a job online back in 1994. Now, she says, the risks far outweigh the slim chance you will get a job from most online posting. Instead, her advice is to work with a recruiter that you trust.
Of course, many people are not heeding that advice. Monster.ca, the largest online resume service in Canada, boasts more than two million resumes, with 40,000 new ones coming in each month. They charge employers anywhere from $595 for two weeks of access to $4,950 for a full year, and their service is free to job seekers.
Joanne Caron, Monster.ca's chief privacy officer, says her company is the best place in Canada to post your resume because "we give you the most options. You can make it searchable or not, and can even make it confidential so your contact information and current employer are not visible."
She adds that they have technical controls that "will detect if any spidering is done.”
If they do catch people trying to scoop up resumes by automated means, their fraud department investigates based on the Internet address of the offender.
But, according to Pam Dixon, it's not just resume'-selling sweatshops that are hungry for your personal data. "Resumes are one of the great treasure troves for identity thieves. Not only do they contain a lot of personal information, your employment history shows if you're the kind of person with a credit rating that's worth stealing."
Monster.ca's Caron says she can only recall one instance of misuse of her company's resume database, and it was "an educational institution trying to use it to do a survey, which is against our terms of use. We cut them right off.”
Asked how they would detect a fraudulent company trying to set up an account with Monster.ca, she says that employers need to speak to a live human being and "it's their job to make sure the company is legitimate."
Once personal data get out there, there's no getting them back. Consider zoominfo.com, which has profiles on more than 16 million executives in more than a million companies.
Heck, they've even got me!
I guess I can take some perverse pride in being the most popular of the 110 "Thomas Keenans" in there. I edged out No. 2, Thomas J. Keenan, president and CEO of Integrated Defense Technologies in Huntsville, Ala.
But wait! My profile shows boards that I no longer serve on, and it's missing my doctoral degree. Hey, how do I update this thing?
There's good reason to worry about how you are characterized in these databases, because they're increasingly being used for pre-employment screening of job hunters. In 2000, NBC's Dateline program featured the sad story of Scott Lewis, an Ohio man whose life was ruined when a police computer operator accidentally put in his social security number as a person accused of murder. Suddenly, Lewis found himself out of work, unable to get a job and sleeping in his car. Finally, a recruiter told him what the problem was and Lewis hired a lawyer to get it corrected.
Even your birthdate is becoming public knowledge, at websites like anybirthday.com. Go there and look up Alfred J. Pacino in zipcode 10964. Yes, that's the real Al Pacino, and he was born on April 25, 1940. You don't need to be a celebrity to be on this website, because it has more than 135 million birthdays. Social security and social insurance numbers are also easy to get. (Dixon says the price of an American social security number is $25 to $35 US.)
Her advice is to yank down your online resumes and biographies and post, if necessary, a very brief and somewhat vague professional profile. Avoid giving the dates and years of your degrees and employment. Omit all family information. For heaven sake's, leave off any of your numbers. And perhaps use a special e-mail so you can track who has tracked you.
Of course, none of this will keep you safe from the rapidly proliferating world of surveillance cameras, radio frequency ID tags and loyalty cards.
To hammer this home, each delegate at CFP was handed a conference bag with a black dome like those used to cover surveillance cameras. A few of the bags had real cameras in them, and the live images were flashed on the conference screen in 10-second slices. Luckily, people figured this out before the first bathroom break, so no major breaches of decency were reported.
CFP 2006 will be held in Washington, D.C., and promises some new and even more exciting ways for the watchers to keep an eye on us.
Web watch: www.cfp2005.org www.worldprivacyforum.org www.cfp2006.org (Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)
