UPS (united parcel service) knows everything about you !

daveleo

daveleo

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I have never had an account at UPS (they deliver packages in the USA).
This morning I tried to track an incoming package, and they asked me to open an account (like signing up on this forum).

I typed in my first and last names, my email address and my street address.

A window pops up and asks me to verify that I am me, by answering six questions..... ????? ....??? Okay, what would like to know ?

These are all multiple choice questions (4 choices - a,b,c,d ).

PLEASE note: these are not security questions that they want me to select to ask me as I log in in the future (for identity protection). These are questions THEY made up from information they got from ??? to verify that the guy at the keyboard here is really me.


The first question was "What month was your son Michael born?" .... *** - they know I have a son Michael???. (They also listed his month of birth.)

Next question: "What town did (do) you live with Deborah?" ..... Deb is my wife !!! (Again, they listed the correct town in the choices.)

Next question: "Which one of these was one of your previous phone numbers?" ..... one of the choices was a number that I disconnected when I retired, 7 years ago.

Here is the question that almost killed me .... "Which one of the following set of numbers is a street address where you lived with Janice" .... Janice and I were divorced 30 years ago !!!

I gotta stop here, my f#$%ing blood pressure is popping my head open.
 
daveleo said:
I have never had an account at UPS (they deliver packages in the USA).
This morning I tried to track an incoming package, and they asked me to open an account (like signing up on this forum).

I typed in my first and last names, my email address and my street address.

A window pops up and asks me to verify that I am me, by answering six questions..... ????? ....??? Okay, what would like to know ?

These are all multiple choice questions (4 choices - a,b,c,d ).

PLEASE note: these are not security questions that they want me to select to ask me as I log in in the future (for identity protection). These are questions THEY made up from information they got from ??? to verify that the guy at the keyboard here is really me.


The first question was "What month was your son Michael born?" .... *** - they know I have a son Michael???. (They also listed his month of birth.)

Next question: "What town did (do) you live with Deborah?" ..... Deb is my wife !!! (Again, they listed the correct town in the choices.)

Next question: "Which one of these was one of your previous phone numbers?" ..... one of the choices was a number that I disconnected when I retired, 7 years ago.

Here is the question that almost killed me .... "Which one of the following set of numbers is a street address where you lived with Janice" .... Janice and I were divorced 30 years ago !!!

I gotta stop here, my f#$%ing blood pressure is popping my head open.
Click to expand...
Well, yes. That's frightening.

Check into Data Protection laws, and see if anyone will help you sue the bar stewards.

Cheers,

R.
 
Happened to me too!

They asked me how many times I had dirty thoughts about Bea Arthur? How did they know? I have very eclectic tastes.

They even knew I like Nikon better than Cannon, and that most of my negatives with a sky have development streaks.

Seriously my guess is as a package delivery company UPS has access to big bro's mainframe.
 
They've been to my house so many times I know the delivery guy by his first name, and his substitute who fills in when he is on vacation.

They know so much about me they will drop off my daughter's packages when she isn't home, and she lives halfway across town. They quit asking me questions. 🙂

Newsflash folks - there are people out there who know so much about you that it would likely scare you to death. People like Amazon, UPS and so on. It is in their business interests to know. Your government knows WAYYY more. I think that the only way to avoid it anymore is to completely drop off the grid. And if you do that you are too different and everyone starts looking at you like Ted Kaczynski, including your friendly neighborhood law enforcement.

I for one am not that interested in living that way so I have learned how to live with the bomb. (Ooops, I may have dated myself again.) 🙂
 
All this is just par for the course. Anyone can know everything about you. It's what life is like these days. You have no privacy.

I would suggest that you watch the episode of Inside Man called Privacy, originally broadcast on CNN on May 4, 2014. Very eye-opening.
 
Why are you surprised? Virtually every internet company knows virtually everything about you, unless you go to painstaking lengths to protect your own data and records.

As a reference, I always use secure emails, do not track options, turn off cookies for most websites, and employ a variety of other measures to ensure that Facebook and Google do not know what my favorite brand of cereal is. It's a tedious life, but probably the only way of hiding under the radar of these companies...🙁
 
I've never had UPS ask me to create an account to track a package. Just tried it now. Maybe there was an (non-obvious, of course) option to skip the login?
 
Thanks (to Stephen ??) for moving this to get more attention.

My son calls this "Big Data". I kind of knew it was going on somewhat but .... ME !!!? MY DATA ??

When my ex-wife's name and our old address (30+ years ago - before the internet !!) showed up in their questions, I d#mn near died.

I also have tracked many UPS, FEDEX and USPS packages and never was asked to "open an account". I used a tracking link that a famous (and wonderful) NYC camera store e-mailed to me. It was probably (in retrospect) a different doorway into UPS.

I am about to put a piece of tape over my netbook camera just in case you guys are watching me, without my knowledge. (Or maybe I should just shave and comb my hair?)
 
Wow. No like! There ARE ways to make yourself invisible on the web though. Using a proxy browser like TOR is a good way to go, which "works by passing your traffic through several unrelated computers all over the Internet, using cryptography to keep the origin, destination, and intermediary steps secret from each computer it passes through".

When google got outed for illegally turning all manner of sensitive data over to the snoops, I immediately started using other search engines, and got a fastmail email account, which has such a small user base it is pretty much under the radar. Of course, it's not in my real name, the internet provider at our home is in the 'ol lady's name (we're not legally married, so there's nothing in public records), and the same w/ the phone and other utilities. Still, I have online banking, ebay, etc, so there's stuff out there, but at least I generally buy and sell on ebay w/ the 'ol lady's account. I haven't tried to totally be invisible, but it is doable if I wished to be. Just doing what I have and using TOR for most things cleans it up a lot. Anything that is dreamed up as far as security snooping can certainly be undone. It's just a matter of whether you want (or need) to go to the trouble. Again, the most effective things you can do are the simplest: use a proxy server, get an email address from a small company that at least says they'll keep your info private, keep your cookies cleared, don't use stuff like bittorrent, don't join any of those reward cards that stores push on you, pay w/ cash if at all possible, refuse to give your social security number to places that ask for it, etc. Not hard stuff.
 
YYV_146 said:
Why are you surprised? Virtually every internet company knows virtually everything about you, unless you go to painstaking lengths to protect your own data and records.

As a reference, I always use secure emails, do not track options, turn off cookies for most websites, and employ a variety of other measures to ensure that Facebook and Google do not know what my favorite brand of cereal is. It's a tedious life, but probably the only way of hiding under the radar of these companies...🙁
Click to expand...

The internet is only a small part of this. Retailers can track your purchasing habits, sure... but if you've ever had a car loan, a house mortgage or applied for a credit card, either singly or jointly with your spouse or ex-spouse, owned real property, bought an insurance policy that lists your heirs, lived in a country with birth, death, marriage, and divorce records, that data lives out there in your credit reports... co-creditors, children, spouses, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth...

disc drive storage never forgets, and collates data at nearly the speed of light. There are a dizzying array of databases that are becoming more and more interactive. THAT is what "BIG DATA" is.
 
This is understood. Your life becomes open to all to see. It is very difficult to delete your Facebook account. I have read about some approaches on how do go about it, but they fail.
 
There is no such thing as privacy.. You get a SSN the moment you are born and they start collecting data on you..

Everything about you is in a data base from the moment you were born to now...
 
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