Shoptimism
Shoptimism is a guided tour through the parallel worlds of selling and buying. Part I, “Them Versus You,” explores “the Sell Side,” where marketing, retailing, advertising, and consumer-research forces take aim on the American buyer. Part II, “You Versus You,” looks at buyers and examines what people are looking at when they buy things, why some people are loose with money and others pinch pennies, the differences between men and women as shoppers and what value there is in practicality, value, novelty and excess.
The book takes readers on a journey through the present and future of consumerism—the emerging importance of social networking, what neuroscience can and can’t tell us about buying behavior and our state of mind as we struggle through challenging economic times. It also provides a social and cultural history of how the American consumer came to be in the early 1900s, how the 1950s changed buying habits and ushered in ever more sophisticated (and sometimes invasive) market research methods and the leveraging of sex as a sales tool.
Lee Eisenberg is a former Esquire magazine writer. Researching the book included a stint as a clerk at Target, encounters with leading academic and marketing experts, a probe into the world of online chatter and forays into stores of every description. More About: Shoptimism
This new book—available March 6, 2009—outlines 10 steps you can take to protect yourself or your family from ID theft and medical identity theft, the fastest growing crime in America.
By reading this book, you will learn what to do now to safeguard your bank accounts, online presence, credit record and more from the potential financial damage of identity theft.
An identity theft is stolen every four seconds in the U.S. The Federal Trade Commission reports that more than eight million people (a growing number of which are children) are victims of identity theft every year - with losses of more than $15 billion annually.
The book offers action-oriented advice designed to prevent identity theft:
Since the Bernard Madoff "Ponzi scheme" scandal broke, shocking investors and the Wall Street community, this insider's guide to investment rip-offs, scams and con artists has been in demand. The book, published in the late '90s, is designed to educate consumers and make them aware of how scams work.
It takes an investigative look at the reasons why Ponzi schemes and pyramid frauds are thriving everywhere. It closely examines why over 100,000 Americans are suckered into the schemes every year. Tips are offered to detect schemes and respond when they occur. More About: 
Who was Ponzi, the man whose name is synonymous with the classic “rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul” scam where money from new investors goes to reward earlier ones? (It's the kind of scheme that Bernard Madoff recently used to rake in $50 billion from gullible folks all over the world.) In December 1919, Charles Ponzi was an unknown 38-year-old, self-educated Italian immigrant with just $200 in his pocket. Six months later, he was the ten-million-dollar man, Boston’s famed “wizard of finance,” lionized by the public and politicians alike.
Based on exclusive interviews with people who knew Charles Ponzi, lent him their money, and exposed him, Donald Dunn’s Ponzi: The Incredible True Story of the King of Financial Cons takes an in-depth look at one of America’s most notorious financial con artists and the mad money-hungry era in which he thrived. More About: 
Today, personal information is captured, processed, and disseminated in a bewildering variety of ways, and through increasingly sophisticated, miniaturized, and distributed technologies: identity cards, biometrics, video surveillance, the use of cookies and spyware by Web sites, data mining and profiling, and many others.
In The Privacy Advocates, Colin Bennett analyzes the people and groups around the world who have risen to challenge the most intrusive surveillance practices by both government and corporations. Bennett describes a network of self-identified privacy advocates who have emerged from civil society—without official sanction and with few resources, but surprisingly influential.
A number of high-profile conflicts in recent years have brought this international advocacy movement more sharply into focus. Bennett is the first to examine privacy and surveillance not from a legal, political, or technical perspective but from the viewpoint of these independent activists who have found creative ways to affect policy and practice.
Drawing on extensive interviews with key informants in the movement, he examines how they frame the issue and how they organize, who they are, and what strategies they use. He also presents a series of case studies that illustrate how effective their efforts have been, including conflicts over key-escrow encryption (which allows the government to read encrypted messages), online advertising through third-party cookies that track users across different Web sites, and online authentication mechanisms such as the short-lived Microsoft Passport.
Finally, Bennett considers how the loose coalitions of the privacy network could develop into a more cohesive international social movement. More About: 
Exploring the conflict between civil liberties and national security, this book sounds the alarm about the current state of surveillance in the United States. Addressing the ease with which the federal government can monitor the telephone calls, e-mail, credit card purchases, money transfers, and even medical prescriptions of ordinary citizens, the book contends that information has become a weapon in the war on privacy. Interviews with people on both sides of the privacy debate—including experts from the Department of Justice, Equifax, Interpol, and Microsoft—provide recommendations about measures citizens can take to protect their privacy.
Rob Hamadi is head of communications at the Publishers Association, United Kingdom, and is the founding chair of the Digital Content Forum's Cybercrime Industry Action Group. He is the author of Identity Theft. He lives in Columbia, South Carolina. More About: 
Privacy is one of the most important concepts of our time, yet it is also one of the most elusive. As rapidly changing technology makes information increasingly available, scholars, activists, and policymakers have struggled to define privacy, with many conceding that the task is virtually impossible.
Daniel J. Solove offers a comprehensive overview of the difficulties involved in discussions of privacy and ultimately provides a provocative resolution. He argues that no single definition can be workable, but rather that there are multiple forms of privacy, related to one another by family resemblances. His theory bridges cultural differences and addresses historical changes in views on privacy. Drawing on a broad array of interdisciplinary sources, Solove sets forth a framework for understanding privacy.
Understanding Privacy is an introduction to long-standing debates and a resource for crafting laws and policies about surveillance, data mining, identity theft, state involvement in reproductive and marital decisions, and other pressing matters concerning privacy. More About: 
How much do we know about why we buy? What truly influences our decisions in today’s message-cluttered world? An eye-grabbing advertisement, a catchy slogan, an infectious jingle? Or do our buying decisions take place below the surface, so deep within our subconscious minds, we’re barely aware of them? In Buyology, Lindstrom presents findings from his three-year, seven-million-dollar neuromarketing study. This experiment looked inside the brains of 2,000 volunteers from all around the world as they encountered various ads, logos, commercials, brands, and products. His results prompt questions about long held beliefs on what seduces our interest and drives us to buy. Among his findings:
Record numbers of people are falling behind on their financial obligations and their debts are being sent to collections. If you're one of them, you know that being contacted by debt collectors can be stressful, especially if they are harassing you, threatening you, and/or using abusive language.
The federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) gives you legal rights when it comes to debt collectors. Stop Debt Collectors: How to protect your rights and resolve your debts tells you how to exercise your rights, resolve your debts and fight back against unfair debt collection tactics.
Stop Debt Collectors explains:
Zero Day Threat: The Shocking Truth of How Banks and Credit Bureaus Help Cyber Crooks Steal Your Money and Identity is a white-collar true-crime story—an investigative expose on bank and lending policies that actually facilitate ID theft and fraud.
The authors, USA Today reporters, reveal the ways that established corporations and technology giants (including Bank of America, Microsoft, and Google) have fixated on the Internet to maximize their profits, heedless of increased risks to customers. While examining the exploding range of hidden Internet hazards, they reveal the ways in which cyber crooks nab identity data - such as Dumpster diving for bountiful paper trash that offers account user names, passwords and Social Security numbers - and then exploit that information through channels opened up by careless corporate policies.
Watch Byron Acohido talk about Zero Day Threat: The Shocking Truth of How Banks and Credit Bureaus Help Cyber Crooks Steal Your Money and Identity.
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Scams have always been with us, and they always will be - except now, technology makes scammers' jobs even easier, enabling them to reach out from anywhere around the world, and take advantage of more people than ever before. No matter how smart you think you are, you can easily become a victim: in fact, scammers have discovered that educated, sophisticated individuals are among their best targets.
The Truth About Avoiding Scams provides information to protect yourself: up-to-the-minute knowledge, and the "internal sensors" you need to sniff out even the subtlest, most well-crafted scams. Consumer finance expert and nationally syndicated radio host Steve Weisman offers quick, bite-size, just-the-facts information about every type of fraud, from identity scams to computer-based fraud, travel and health scams to phony educational loans and scholarships. Weisman exposes the new epidemic of "affinity fraud," where "people just like you" target you based on your ethnicity, racial group, church, club, or fraternal organization. The book contains guidance on avoiding illegitimate online dating services; "cramming" and other phone frauds; tax and Social Security scams; employment, home repair, and investment scams; and more.
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Liz Pulliam Weston is a personal finance columnist whose twice-weekly columns for MSN Money reach more than six million people each month. In her new book she provides a complete action plan for improving your credit score. Credit scores—numbers that sum up your credit history based on information in your credit report—have bearing on many aspects of life, including credit, insurance, renting a home and employment. A poor credit score can cost you reall money on credit and insurance.
According to Library Journal, Weston "takes us through how and why they were developed, how to determine an individual's score, how to improve one's score, and how to deal with a "credit crisis" such as bankruptcy, divorce, job loss, and other events that can wreck one's credit score. She also covers two frequently overlooked areas, the effect of identity theft on credit scores and the correlation between credit scores and insurance rates."
Weston, who is also the author of the question-and-answer column Money Talk, which appears in the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers throughout the country, is is a weekly guest on CNBC's Power Lunch and has appeared on NBC, Fine Living, PAX TV, and other networks.
Formerly a personal finance writer for the Times, Weston has won numerous reporting awards. She was part of a three-member writing team that won a Gerald Loeb Award for coverage of the Comparator Systems penny stock scandal in 1997. More About: 
Watch out, spammers! Michael Berry's revenges against the purveyors of e-mail pollution are funny, savage and inventive.
"With warm hearts I offer my friendship, and my greetings, and I hope this letter meets you in good time. It will be surprising to you to receive this proposal from me since you do not know me personally. However, I am sincerely seeking your confidence in this transaction, which I propose with my free mind and as a person of integrity. My name is Jacob Kamala the son of Mr. A.Y Kamala, a farmer from Zimbabwe, murdered in the land dispute in my country. As led by my instinct, I decided to contact you through email…"
The above, or something similar, is familiar: letters asking us for money for orphans, for victims of hurricanes, letters telling us we’ve won the Spanish lottery, letters telling us we have been contacted because we are known to be of good integrity and could be trusted to bank $30 million in our saving’s account, for a generous fee of 10% of the sum.
To most of us the letters are an irritant. To Berry they are a call to arms. For the last five years he has replied to the scammers emails, expressing an interest in their propositions and then spending days, weeks, even months leading them down the garden path with his hilarious requests and misunderstandings. He’s had them selling paintings to Del Trotter Antiques, tattooing themselves so as to become members of his bogus church, booking expensive hotels for his no-show personas, seeking criminal compensation from Inspector Morse, writing out a Harry Potter novel by hand, or being killed by a mugger just outside the Western Union office where he was about to make a payment to them and, cruelest of all, falling in love with him as he pretends to be Gillian Anderson.
Michael Berry runs a scambaiting website 419eater.com named after the numbered clause in Nigeria's penal code outlawing ‘advanced fee’ fraud.
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With the explosive growth of the Internet and broadband communications, our society now has the potential for a truly democratic media system offering a wide variety of independent sources of news, information, and culture, with control over content in the hands of the many rather than a few giant media companies.
The country’s powerful communications companies have big plans to do business their way. Big cable, TV, and Internet providers are using their political clout to gain ever greater control over the Internet and other digital communication channels. Instead of a “global information commons,” we are facing an electronic media system designed principally to sell to rather than serve the public, dominated by commercial forces armed with aggressive digital marketing, interactive advertising and personal data collection.
Author Jeff Chester gets beneath the surface of media and telecommunications regulation to explain clearly how our new media system functions, what’s at stake, and what we can do to fight the corporate media’s plans for our “digital destiny”—before it’s too late.
Chester, the executive director of the 
Spychips, the eye-opening work about the downsides of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), is available in paperback. The book has already shaken the industry and prompted legislative initiatives worldwide. 
In In No Place to Hide, award-winning Washington Post reporter Robert O'Harrow, Jr., pulls back the curtain on an unsettling trend: the emergence of a data-driven surveillance society intent on giving us the conveniences and services we crave, like cell phones, discount cards, and electronic toll passes, while watching us more closely than ever before. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, information industry giants have been enlisted as private intelligence services for homeland security. At a time when companies routinely collect billions of details about nearly every American adult, No Place to Hide reveals how people can lose control of their privacy and identities. O'Harrow writes, "This book is all about you and your personal information -- and the story isn't pretty." No Place to Hide will be available in paperback in January 2006. More About: 
The U.S. credit reporting system keeps detailed financial histories on more than 200 million Americans. Evan Hendricks' Credit Scores & Credit Reports is a well-informed, informative, and well-written guide to a subject of great and growing importance to consumers. Hendricks, a foremost privacy expert, examines in detail the credit scoring and credit reporting systems and helps consumers understand what they can do to improve their credit scores and ensure that their credit reports are accurate. Hendricks also explains how the system sometimes doesn't work and how consumers have been frustrated in their efforts to correct errors in their credit reports. According to Hendricks, there is also a link between credit reports and the burgeoning problem of identity theft.
Other topics include: how credit card companies use credit scoring to raise your interest rates; the role of credit scores in auto and homeowners insurance; the difference between mortgage rates for consumers with excellent, good, fair and poor credit scores; the damages to consumers and their creditworthiness flowing from credit report inaccuracy and identity theft ; credit reports and debt collection; the debate over credit scoring and discrimination; the politics of credit reporting. More About: 
Bob Sullivan, author and identity theft expert, probes this exploding crime. ID theft has hit ordinary citizens and celebrities alike, from Oprah Winfrey to Steven Spielberg, and costs the economy $50 billion a year. "Your Evil Twin" covers the topic from every angle, from mastermind identity thieves who have pilfered money from members of the Forbes 400 to Russian hackers who have extorted money from U.S. banks. The book offers a scathing indictment of the credit granting industry, from credit card issuers to credit reporting agencies, and examines lackluster responses and solutions put forward by the industry and government.
Bob Sullivan is a senior technology writer for MSNBC.com who covers many compelling consumer news stories. He has written more than 100 articles on ID theft since 1996. He is a regular contributor to MSNBC, CNBC, NBC Nightly News, the Today show and local NBC affiliates. With his colleague Mike Brunker, Sullivan received the prestigious 2002 Society of Professional Journalists Public Service Award for ongoing coverage of Internet fraud. More About: 