More than 36 million Americans have been the victim of identity theft in the last four years, according to Javelin. Usually, the way you find out our ID was stolen is when your bank account or credit is affected. ID Watchdog’s idCHECK, promises to change that by alerting consumers that their ID has been stolen before damaging transactions occur.

“Identity theft impacts millions of consumers every year, but often goes undetected for months or even years, giving thieves plenty of time to do serious damage,” said Daniel Mohan, President and Chief Operating Officer of ID Watchdog.

idCHECK crawls thousands of consumer databases to examples of the theft of a user’s identity. By scraping all of the data on the databases, idCHECK quickly identifies suspicious uses of customers’ data. Think of it like a credit report, but about the privacy of your data.

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Part 2 of ChoiceStream’s 2009 Personalization Survey was released this week, showing that consumers found online product recommendations less useful last year than 2008.

Other findings were published by the recommendations service provider, who works with big brands such as Tesco, Zappos.com and more. The decrease in credibility for consumers is specified by retail category.

Overall, 31 percent more online shoppers received poor quality recommendations in 2009 than the 45 percent in 2008. Most respondents said that quality was poor because suggested products were unrelated to what they were looking for.

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The development of personalization and product recommendation has become an integral part of online commerce. The annual ChoiceStream Personalization Survey released key findings this and last month regarding the developing role of mobile recommendations, recommendation quality, and more.

The adoption of smartphones has made mobile site optimization a must, as the small screen space makes for a very different browsing experience. 65 percent of respondents would be more likely to make a purchase if trusted retailers made it easier to find products.

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Image via Wikipedia

Facebook started rolling out navigation updates to its user homepage yesterday, with an emphasis on making the menu bars more powerful and quick to use. Since the new features are still being phased in, most users will still be stuck with the previous design and other people’s screengrabs of the new look, just like yours truly.

As staff engineer Jing Chen explains on the blog, the top menu will have little icons that trigger pop-up menus for notifications, requests and messages. When there is a new notification, etc, a red bubble will appear on the left near the search bar.

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Fifty-seven percent of consumers are likely to abandon an online purchase if they can’t find quick answers to questions, according to Forrester.

“If 50 percent of customers can’t find the answer they’re looking for on a site, they leave the site and become what eBay calls ‘silent sufferers,’” says Mark Gaydos, VP of Worldwide Marketing for VirtuOZ, a Paris and San Francisco-based virtual avatar (VA) company.

Most consumers want to find the information themselves on a site, whether through search or FAQ’s; email and call centers are often a last resort.

VirtuOZ merges the two, fusing the facility of search with the engagement of conversation, providing companies with virtual avatars that turn customer service search and FAQ’s into a dialogue with a virtual representative personalized to the brand.

The goal is to increase customer engagement, while reducing the time involved in answering customers’ questions and resolving their problems.

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Facebook released new terms for advertising providers Wednesday, clearly delineating policies that favor honesty and consumer rights. Some of the agreements for ad providers include:

• Limits on data collection, storage and usage including some prohibitions on developers sharing data with monetization providers
• Making available the contact information for all operators and employees of the ad provider, as well as contact info for developers or applications that the ad provider works with
• They cannot deny a user customer service if the user does not use the ad provider’s application or does not provide personal information. Additionally, information gathered through an application cannot be used to tailor content, including ads
• Send a feed of all content to Facebook, and ensure that all content, tailoring efforts and user complaints are available
• Make sure that the means for a user to make a complaint are clear and conspicuous

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University of Missouri professor Ming Leu is testing the use of the Nintendo Wii’s remotes – Wiimotes – to streamline the aerospace manufacturing process.

Leu is using the Wiimote to record an assembly process to improve employee training, shorten cycle time, reduce injuries and improve global communication between plants.

The benefits of the Wii are its cheap price, wireless communication and the fact that its signal covers a long range.

Leu also hopes to use the Wiimote’s camera to capture the movements of factory workers.

“The Wiimotes allow us to easily capture motion in the assembly process wirelessly,” says Leu. “We can track that motion, analyze the processes and make improvements based on the data generated through the motion-capture.”

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Recently it was revealed that the most popular password for online sites is ‘123456.’

Not exactly Dan Brown-level cryptography.

Even more eye-opening is that consumers aren’t even careful with the stuff that’s really vulnerable – their bank passwords.

Seventy-three percent of people reuse their bank passwords on other, non-financial, sites, according to online security firm Trusteer (PDF). Forty-seven percent use both their banking password and user ID on nonfinancial sites.

This just makes it too easy for criminals, who can hack into less-secure sites like email or social networks to get bank passwords or other sensitive information.

While some institutions try to increase users’ protection by choosing unique IDs for them, 42 percent of those users end up using that unique ID with at least one nonfinancial site. Sixty-five percent of users who create their own unique user name use that name on at least one nonfinancial site.

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Spam and malware attacks on social networks have risen 70 percent in the last year, according to data protection firm Sophos.

Thirty-six percent of respondents to Sophos’ survey have been sent malware over social networks in the past year, an increase of 69.8 percent. Fifty-seven percent of respondents have been spammed via social networks.

“Computer users are spending more time on social networks, sharing sensitive and valuable personal information, and hackers have sniffed out where the money is to be made,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos.

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The recent attacks on Google have brought increased attention to cybersecurity. Now a new report (PDF) from political scientists at the University of Cincinnati says that defense is ultimately in our hands as citizens.

In what has undertones of the Cold War and the Patriot Act – but also indicates the new levels of engagement, both private and in terms of national security – that we might ultimately have as citizens in an age where privacy decreases and corporate, governmental and individual vulnerabilities increase.

The report’s authors, Richard Harknett and James Stever, say that while discussions of cybersecurity coordination frequently occur between governmental agencies and businesses, a crucial third element, the public, is not brought into the discussion.

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