The Goofproof Blog - Business Booster

October 31, 2009

The Red Flag Rule

Filed under: Internet Marketing, Miscellaneous — Tags: , , — sol21 @ 9:56 pm

Until November 1st 2009, the battered consumer was responsible for protecting his own identity.  It was up to him to report any suspected fraud to the credit bureaus, and to check them frequently. 

Starting Sunday, businesses that accept  credit cards will have to take extra steps to protect your personal information on the front end,  and investigate if  they find something suspicious. Federal Trade Commission rules, called “Red Flag Rules” will kick in. Businesses  small and large, must do a better job of verifying the identity of their customers - to keep them from being taken advantage of by identity thieves.

Focus will be on such information as “where they bill you now and you pay in 30 days,” said Miami attorney Luis Salazar, of Greenberg Traurig. “If there’s a red flag, they have to investigate.”

Even the smallest business, if they qualify as a creditor, are  subject to the rules, which were enacted in 2007. The deadline to put the rules into effect was extended to give businesses time to come up with written plans to address identity theft. The red flag rule is supposed to help  by shifting some of the burden from consumers to businesses. Learn more at http://www.ftc.gov/redflagrule.

But you, as a consumer,  should still keep  close watch on your personal information. Here are some suggestions from the Federal Trade Commission:

-Protect your Social Security number. Don’t carry your card if you don’t need it. Ask why someone needs it if it is requested.

-Handle mail with care. Shred documents that contain credit card numbers, banking information and credit card offers. Limit credit card offers: Call 888-5-OPT-OUT (888-567-8688).

-Don’t give out personal information on the phone, via mail or the Internet, unless you initiated contact and are sure of whom you’re dealing with.

-Freeze your credit report so potential creditors and others can’t access it unless you lift the freeze. This has to be done by contacting individual credit agencies: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. You can learn more about credit freezes at http://www.consumersunion.org/campaigns/learn-more/003484indiv.html.

-Check your credit report for free three times a year at http://www.annualcreditreport.com. You can check one report from each major credit bureau once a year. Beware of sites that have a similar web address as this official site but actually charge for their services or require enrollment in some kind of program. You can also call 877-322-8228.

-Use intricate passwords that don’t involve your mother’s maiden name, birthday or the lst four digits of your Social Security number. 

Identity theft has been consumers’ No. 1 complaint to the FTC for nine years running, with nearly 314,000 complaints in 2008.

“Nobody wants to be overburdened with regulations,” Salazar said, “but they want to do something about” identity theft.

Let’s hope it works!

October 14, 2009

What? How? When? Where?

Filed under: Internet Marketing, Miscellaneous — Tags: , , , , , , — sol21 @ 7:39 pm

The four eternal questions pop into view whenever we think of  beginning, changing, moving on, or revisiting Square One.  All those verbs have been activated, perhaps too frequently, in the past couple of  years.

Businesses of  any size keep an eye on them to ensure survival in good or bad times.  But all seem to agree  that  what we have been experiencing lately is no ordinary good or bad time.  Each month focuses on one or another of  the crucial words but, unfortunately adds little clarity.

The one thing that never changes though,  is the human capacity to innovate - and that capacity increases geometrically with the need to survive - and thrive.  Just check through the articles in your business magazines throughout 2009.  Have they been moaning and groaning about the sad state of  the economy?  Hardly a word.  What is the ONE keyword that has stirred up your brain cells?  CREATIVITY!  And how have thousands of entrepreneurs worldwide harnessed that valuable resource?  First, and foremost, take your ideas seriously.  They are your gold mine.  Then ask yourself :  WHAT can I do with “this?” No matter what “this” is,  if  it interests you, you can do something with it. It will lead you to finding the right partners, the right funders, the right buyers. And that takes care of the HOW! The WHAT  teaches you the HOW.  The WHEN is now.  Right now. Don’t procrastinate. Do it now! And what about WHERE?  Start wherever you are.  Again, the right place will emerge from the WHAT and HOW.  It’s  all built in. 

So dust off your brain cells and look around you - your future is probably right under your nose!

October 3, 2009

Remember This? Remember That? Maybe . . .

Filed under: Miscellaneous — Tags: , , , — sol21 @ 9:36 pm

If  you happen to be in Washington D.C. before November 1st, stop by the Taubman Museum and see three new world networked robots at work remembering.  What they actually do is filter internet noise, somehow transform what they can remember into real paint, and drop the paint onto canvas.  Each robot has its own color, one red, one blue, one green and each color has its own canvas.  The robots gather their data and “paint”  for 6 hours every day.  The exhibit is supposed to epitomize the evolution of digital art.  As we know from Darwinian evolution, however, evolving takes many forms, whether it is a fish flopping out of the sea and gradually becoming a bird,  or a 21st Century machine transforming data into paint.  The point being that this is ONE expression of the evolution of digital art.  There are many others.  (see DIGIDECO.com)

The resulting canvases are interesting in that they resemble looms;  large frameworks filled with vertical strings through which weavers work strands  of  wool or silk or any other fiber,  resulting in a piece of cloth, or rug, or whatever  the weaver fancies.  Here, the vertical strings are composed of  the drippiest of the pigments, dropped at the top, running straight to the bottom.  The less drippy drops traverse only a part of the canvas, resulting in the resemblance to the unfinished woven artwork (yes, a rug or a cloth is an  artwork.)

 ”The Remembrancer,”  as the networked robots are called,  was installed by Alberto Gaitán,   and will be on display until November 1st.  The creator describes his work as “highlighting the  ultimate meaning of  loss in an age of  information.”    Gaitán says, “Nobody has the capacity for total information awareness so we relinquish big chunks of our understanding to black boxes of knowledge whose provenance we don’t fully understand. We make important decisions and base stacks of assumptions on these. Our memories are rife with inaccuracies, and forgetting or ignoring becomes a significant aspect of remembering.”

Two centuries of  Psychologists have  arrived at virtually the same conclusions by methods available to them in their time.  By whatever method used, the conclusion is still that only a small fraction of  the information poured into our brains is remembered;  much is distorted by what is already there,  and much is denied or delibrately forgotten.

So don’t despair if you can’t remember where your socks are.  Your brain has relegated the location to a black box!

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