I would like to thank NetGalley and the Author for giving me the opportunity to review this ARC.

This book focuses on the scary level of identity theft and information insecurity we have all become exposed to through our many interactions and transactions in the online and physical world. The author having lived through a serious experience in identity theft and the detrimental impact on his life, clearly outlines the exposure we all have and then recommends a number of specific steps we can and should take to reduce our risk and if necessary steps to take to counter the problems of being the subject of identity theft.

The book is clearly written and very understandable, with specific actionable recommendations for the reader to take. Definitely a wake up call and a view on the trade off between convenience vs security we all face.

My fear is that most of us will not follow the preemptive advise but have to focus on the after problem corrective actions.

Thanks Chris for sharing with us your knowledge and experience with cybersecurity and identity theft. It must have been a roller coaster kind of experience.

I like that the book is very easy to read and you sound like a friend providing helpful advice. I find many useful tips to protect myself and my family as much as possible. By writing this book you are helping a lot of people in our digital world.

This book is good overall at describing the problem of identity theft and things you can do to protect yourself. It was pretty depressing, because it seemed overwhelming.
The author was himself a victim of identity theft, specifically targeted by a ring of crooks who went so far as to mess with his mother. He was in disbelief at first, and the more he learned about what happened, the more attempts the criminals made against him.
There are a lot of ways we set ourselves up for violations by being open online, and part of the solution is to change our own behavior. It seems that there should also be a better effort to identify the perpetrators and provide consequences for their behavior.
Even law enforcement isn't united in providing a defense. Hopefully this situation will get better instead of worse.
Thanks to NetGalley for letting me read this

Using his own experience with digital life under attack, Christopher Smith shares all he has learnt on how to protect oneself in an ever-changing digital landscape. Taking the reader logically through all the elements when considering privacy and one’s identity.

“You can have privacy or convenience. You can’t have both.’ The more you have of one, the less you have of the other.“
This is a wise adage, I have a broad understanding of technology and privacy so I didn’t gain a huge amount of knowledge but I appreciate the easy-to-read style and the flow of the book is well-constructed,

“The solution isn’t exclusively better technology. It’s correcting human behavior and giving us better tools.”
There is a how-to guide at the end, a walkthrough to protect yourself and those you love but it comes with a strong proviso, it takes effort from us, we have to engage and invest time as we do in our physical world security.

“But if corporate employees or consumers are engaging in reckless behavior, like using the same easy-to-guess password on multiple websites, no technology is going to be of much help.”
This is a worthwhile read for anyone looking to orientate themselves in the cybercrime landscape and learn more about spamming, phishing, identity theft, and so on! It’s highly recommended and four out of five on the enJOYment scale.

I received a complimentary copy of the book from Amplify Publishing Group through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

The book gives the nudge and shove needed to stop being your own worst enemy. You can't guess some of the ways in which personal identity info gets compromised. The book gives you a clear look at what's at risk and what you can do about it. For example, you are the Trojan horse that could be used to hurt your family via personal identity theft. It's the book you want your children, spouse, mom and dad to read along with you. Because they are the weak links in your so-called security hygiene you may be proud of. The literary style of the author makes the book as readable as a self-help or pulp fiction book. Given the topic, if that's not an achievement, I don't know what is.

Privacy Pandemic: How Cybercriminals Determine Targets, Attack Identities, and Violate Privacy—and How Consumers, Companies, and Policymakers Can Fight Back by Christopher A. Smith.

I was scared to read this book. I've been a victim several times of identity theft, so it's a sensitive subject for me. I was worried reading this book about all the things I needed to do to protect myself and the things I haven't been doing (though I'm pretty careful now).

I have tightened my trust in online websites and retailers and am very selective about not clicking on random links, etc. Society relies so much on doing things online or using debit and credit cards, even more so since the pandemic. I remember calling a banking institution during the pandemic, and the customer service agent must have been working from home because I could hear the beeping of the smoke alarm battery in the background. I promptly ended the call as I felt vulnerable, and who knows what other people were in the home and could gain access to my data.

This book is an amazing resource of things to do to secure your data. The author details the companies, software, tools, and practices that give us all the best chance of preventing security breaches and their disastrous consequences, and he shares how he has turned hardship into triumph, ensuring the power to protect personal information is in the hands of each of us.

Privacy Pandemic is a great resource to have on hand and keep close by. I would recommend Privacy Pandemic.

#PrivacyPandemic #NetGalley @AmplifyBookPub

I read this book as a pre-release e-book obtained through NetGalley, provided by the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

If there’s one thing to be gotten here is for us to be a little less trusting of people, things, claims, and websites. If you can get just one thing from this book, it would be, “Make ‘Prove to me that you’re legit.’ your new mantra.”

There are a lot of things we can do to secure our personally identifiable information – not just for ourselves, but for our young children and for our very elderly grandparents. Not using the internet does not make one invulnerable to these attacks! Children will not be checking their credit reports, and no one will notice that criminals are using it in conjunction with a different name and address. Seniors may not notice, or just get upset at a company trying to collect a debt which they do not owe – or may agree that they owe it and just pay it!

People give a lot of this information away “just for fun” when answering questionnaires such as “Which Game of Thrones character are you?” The answer is unimportant to anyone, but in taking this online quiz, we happily give away a lot of personally identifiable information. Don’t think for one second that this information is not stored, used, sold, and re-sold. Some of these purchasers are bad actors, who use this information to create fictitious persons.

There were 1.4 million identity thefts in 2020. Approximately 10% of them have had ideas of suicide. That’s a lot of people! Indeed, there are parallels between theft of information and infectious disease. One is that both kill. Just as we can reduce our risk of a particular infectious disease, we can reduce our risk of having our information stolen. Just as we can treat a person with an infectious disease, we can treat the problems encountered after our identity was stolen and misused. As with infectious disease, it has a lower cost to prevent information theft than it is to stop misuse once it’s occurring. It takes the average person 60 hours of work to stop it once it’s occurred. It takes far less to prevent it from happening.

There are a great number of ideas for things you can do, and organizations and companies to help you secure information from theft, and to deal with its theft after it has occurred. Even 34 years after a theft of my information occurred – before anything like the Internet was in general use – I’m still dealing with after-effects and recurrences when someone new begins using my information. Often, it’s a quick “one and done” hit, and other times the problem goes on and on for years. That’s more likely if the theft was personal. Trusted loved ones, including family or spouses, who have access to social security numbers and birth certificates, can be the cause. So can a friend to whom you give your used, and wiped, old iPhone. Note that it’s next to impossible to truly wipe information off of electronics. It can be gotten by a determined person or company. We’re also less likely to turn in the thieves if we have strong social or emotional ties to them.