Your personal identity security...

[telophase]

...also depends on you not doing stupid things.

Idiot Bill Bickels Saga. These are blog posts from the BB who runs Comics I Don't Understand, who's been dealing for a while with another guy with his name who continually gives out a mistyped version of his email address. Which happens to be the comics guy's address. The address is given to places such as his bank account, his Netflix account, other forms that reveal personal information to the recipient of the address. Including to someone who attached a copy of a mortgage application to a misdirected email. And despite having been notified multiple times, the guy seems totally unconcerned about this.

Comments

[rilina]

I have multiple idiots who give out my email address. At one point I was getting their investment statements from Fidelity. ARGHHHH.

[telophase]

Yikes! It never occurred to me until someone else had already claimed it that I might want firstname.lastname or some such combo as an email address, so I haven't had to deal with that. My slightly-more-professional-looking one is my first two initials and last name, which isn't prone to this sort of thing.

[badnoodles.livejournal.com]

I've done that a couple of times, actually. I always forget that my gmail account includes my middle initial. Most of my name-based logins are first initial + last names, so whoever rm----- is, they've gotten a fair amount of stuff intended for me!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

:) Whoever's got telophase@ has on occasion received emails meant for me, when people left the 14 off, but telophase14 is pretty easy for me to remember, so at least I can claim it's not my fault.

[awamiba.livejournal.com]

I have someone like that who continually has important info misdirected to me. I even spoke to her attorney by phone once, informed her of the situation...and the information continues to flow my way. I have no idea. So now that it's gone on 5 years, I just go and "update" her information with randomness whenever the chance occurs...and make sure the email address is changed to something else entirely.