Your Secrets Are My Business: Security Expert Reveals How your Trash License Plate Credit Cards cmptr Even you
Product Description
Knee-deep in a dumpster. Hidden in a drop ceiling. Digging up dirt on Robert De Niro’s blackmailer. Getting copies of Larry King’s hotel bill. Uncovering your most personal secrets.
Kevin McKeown knows how easy it is to find out anything about anyone-from credit card, bank account, and Social Security numbers to family histories. A top investigator and security advisor, he has spent the last twenty years doing covert sleuthing for everyone from Fortune 500 companies to government agencies to A-list Hollywood celebrities. Now this professional insider shares the tools of his trade, and offers concrete tips for safeguarding our lives from the threats posed by the everyday conveniences we take for granted, from the cell phone to the family car. You’ll learn about:
– Shoulder surfing
– Behavioral fingerprints
– The black box
– Traveling eyes
– Phone clone And what you can do to protect yourself
Entertaining, informative, and instructive, with thrilling accounts of McKeown’s high-profile cases, Your Secrets Are My Business is a must-read for everyone who wants to keep their secrets to themselves.Amazon.com Review
Privacy is almost obsolete. There’s an army of data miners out there digging up as much dirt as possible on you, your loved ones, and practically everyone else in the world, but you can plug up the leaks if you know their tricks. Security experts Kevin McKeown and Dave Stern want to show you who’s looking, what he or she is looking for, and how that person is getting access to your most private information, starting with Social Security number, address, and employer, and moving up to your buying habits and your children’s play habits. Your Secrets Are My Business is a 250-page self-help manual for the paranoid–and if you’re not even a little nervous about who might be looking over your shoulder, by the time you’ve read the first chapter, you’ll be eager for McKeown’s suggestions. Even that holiest of holies, your credit-card number, is seen by more people than you probably trust–but if you carefully observe your purchasing habits, you can catch fraud before it wrecks your bank account.
The book alternates, on the one hand, between morbidly entertaining stories of McKeown’s days in the trenches following the trail of insurance fraud to the Caribbean and digging through Dumpsters to piece together criminal profiles and, on the other, extremely practical tips for ensuring your privacy (even if you aren’t a villainous mastermind). The authors keep the reader interested while making their case for a return to old-fashioned notions of private life. It takes quite a bit of energy to protect your personal information, but the freedom from harassment by junk mailers, telephone solicitors, and other unsavory types is worth it. Whether you want to know how to stay in hiding or just want to learn why people care about what car you drive, Your Secrets Are My Business will make your life seem a thousand times more interesting, because you’ll see it through the eyes of a professional investigator. –Rob Lightner
Posted in Info | 
Tags: Business, Cards, Caribbean, cmptr, Credit, Dave Stern, Even, everyday conveniences, Expert, Hollywood, Kevin McKeown, Larry King, license, Plate, Reveals, Rob Lightner, Robert De Niro, Secrets, Security, Trash
5 Responses to “Your Secrets Are My Business: Security Expert Reveals How your Trash License Plate Credit Cards cmptr Even you”
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This book makes it really clear that privacy doesn’t exist. McKeown uses some very funny stories to illustrate the techniques the con men use to steal people’s identities. Not only is this a fun read, it also has great reference information as to how to protect your credit, secure your privacy, and make it so you are NOT a target for the criminals. This is a book for everyone — if you don’t think you could be a target for the identity theives, you’re wrong. If you’re not careful, they can get enough information just from looking at your car parked in a parking lot to rip you off — scary stuff.
Rating: 5 / 5
I publish a newsletter on personal privacy and I am the author of a forthcoming book on this subject. Most of the books in this field–and I have them all–are full of generalizations and rehashed ideas. Kevin McKeown furnishes some surprising new information and co-author Dave Stern writes in an entertaining (if sometimes disorganized) fashion. If you wish to find out how private investigators can track you down, buy this book.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is WAY past its pull date. Full of warnings about not calling back the unrecognized number on your pager (pager?), the ease of using a consumer-grade scanner to evesdrop your cell phone calls (not since the cell network went digital!), and how you should shred paperwork with identifying information on it (duh!).
The over-riding assumption is that anyone with something to hide must be a criminal. The reader is told to vary your hours, commute route, and habits so ‘they’ can’t catch you, because you must be trying to get away with something. For the rest of us law-abiding types, the message is “privacy is obsolete. get over it.”
Even worse, the author and the ghost-writer (this is one of those books by someone WITH someone else) must have been paid by the word. It goes on and on and on, just to convey the merest morsel of a factoid.
But worst of all, the author is such a big shot, you’re supposed to be really impressed with the names he drops and the James Bond-style exploits he pulled. He walked right into office buildings after-hours and stole bags of trash! He staked out the parking lot of the YMCA residence and guessed that the only non-hoopty in the lot belonged to the embezzeler! He shoulder-surfed the old man in line in front of him at the bank to learn his identity! Shaken-not-stirred stuff, you bet!
I have a lot of books on my shelf, and I don’t mind reading a lot of pages to get a little information. But this turkey yielded NO information of use, and so it went right back in the box and back to Amazon.
Rating: 1 / 5
I was unable to put the book down it was so easy to read! Lots of great advice on ways to protect yourself from con artists who want to steal your identity. Who knew that it was so easy to have someone get personal information on anyone? This book is worth reading to protect you and your family!
Rating: 5 / 5
I saw the book in a bookstore and bought it on a whim. Interesting, funny, and also educational. Some of the issues of infringement into your privacy are scary. A very, very good read!
Rating: 5 / 5