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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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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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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So it’s official. The Apple tablet rumors have ended.

At this morning’s Apple event in San Francisco, Steve Jobs unveiled what Silicon Valley has been whispering about for years. Dubbed the ‘iPad,’ Apple’s tablet could be just the thing to launch smartphone-notebook hybrids into the mainstream.

“We want to kick off 2010 by introducing a truly magical and revolutionary new product,” Jobs said at the event.

The iPad is fundamentally a netbook-sized iPhone. Outside of the design, the most impressive thing about the iPad is its 10-hour battery life, which is pretty representative of what we should expect from the category. Also impressive is the weight – 1.5 pounds.

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Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Usually when we think about human-machine interaction, we imagine robots acting like regular people but without any emotions. Science fiction has tried to define what the future of these machines that might one day replace humanity will be, but that event doesn’t actually seem possible in the next few years. But one industry could be very interesting for the future of human-machine interactions: video games.

We had the example of the Wii, released in 2006, which captures your movements with controllers and reproduces them on screen. What Microsoft revealed at last year’s E3, the Natal Project, is simply a game changer: with some basic hardware (sensors with infrared signals, HD video camera and microphone), users no longer need controllers to play videogames. What is the trick? As Scientific American revealed a few days ago, there are algorithms developed by Microsoft research in Cambridge, England, that can recognize gestures “by extrapolating from experience” like a human being. The article offers very good insight into the technological challenges of the project. The Natal release is planned for the 2010 holidays and will be the big event for the entire industry. But not only that.

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Tablet computers have been around for a while, but they didn’t really capture the imagination until last year, when rumors of the Apple Tablet swirled with a fury.

Deloitte predicts that netbook-sized tablets – NetTabs – will fill in the space between notebooks and smartphones, reaching perhaps $1 billion in 2010.

NetTabs are netbook-sized tablets whose functionalities are modeled after smartphones. Their cost will be in the $400-$800 range.

“With a new form factor and significant processing capacity, connected portable devices will likely be purchased by tens of millions of people in 2010,” according to Deloitte. “These devices have an advantage over smartphones—which are small for watching videos or web browsing—and notebooks, netbooks, and ultra-thin PCs, which are too heavy, or expensive.

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While m-commerce is growing, the biggest turn-off to potential customers is poor site design, according to Compete’s quarterly Smartphone Intelligence survey.

Thirty-seven percent of smartphone users have purchased something non-mobile in the last six months. The major obstacle to upping this number is that many sites are broken.

Eight percent of customers who tried to make a mobile purchase were unable to do so. That’s almost one-in-ten potential purchases failing at POS.

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“Privacy” has been in the headlines a lot this past week, from lingering uncertainties left by the Tiger Woods story, to Eric Schmidt’s widely derided anti-privacy statements and Facebook’s (also derided) security changes.

Which makes it strangely apropos that Techcrunch reported Friday on Blippy, a still-in-beta service that shares your credit-card transactions with your friends online.

That’s right, share your credit card purchases with friends. Online. Sure, you might think that that’s probably the last thing you’d want to do, but, in all fairness, some people would.

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So far, U.S. online holiday spending is up 3 percent, according to comScore. That’s a fairly healthy increase, all things considered.

As of December 6th, consumers have spent $16 billion online this holiday season.

Online sales have dropped off since Thanksgiving and Black Friday’s respective growth of 10 and 11 percent. Cyber Monday sales grew 5 percent year-over-year to $887 million, while the following week’s sales fell to 3 percent growth before falling into the negative over the weekend.

“After a strong beginning to the week, we saw growth rates decelerate over the weekend to put this past week of holiday shopping in line with our 3 percent growth forecast for the season,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni.

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