Company X does research on members' demographics, interests and behavior based on the information collected upon registration, during a promotion, from server logs or from surveys. Company X may use third parties to collect or distribute information to or from members. The user's profile, if set up on the hosting e-mail service, may contain additional personal and publicly visible information. Web searches on the user's e-mail identifier may reveal other systems where the user is active, which contain additional fragments of publicly visible information. Any of this information, combined with ZIP code and birth date is sufficient to perform searches for Social Security number, telephone listings and other data.
Criminals use the Internet to target students.
School information published on the Internet is an open invitation to identity thieves. Identity thefts on college campuses have become a significant method of financial exploitation, and could move into lower schools as a means for manipulating college admission and financial applications, for example. Stalkers, sex offenders and other social criminals are monitoring school information on the Internet. Lists of all people and departments in the school that are retaining records, what kinds of records are retained and how the information in those records is used within the school. Lists of all information that has been disclosed to third parties, including what information, why it was disclosed, and who disclosed it and when.