| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24] > | Illegal use of data from ProZ.com profile Thread poster: RoxanaTrad (X)
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I found a profile registered to my ProZ user ID, which is different from the full name I chose to display here. As for many colleagues, my profile there is empty, but I find its very existence quite disturbing. The good news is that I couldn't find it searching for my last name so, at least in my case, they appear to have grabbed just my user ID and not my whole profile. The bad thing is that they were able to mine for information only ProZ staff should have access to.
I think I remember g... See more I found a profile registered to my ProZ user ID, which is different from the full name I chose to display here. As for many colleagues, my profile there is empty, but I find its very existence quite disturbing. The good news is that I couldn't find it searching for my last name so, at least in my case, they appear to have grabbed just my user ID and not my whole profile. The bad thing is that they were able to mine for information only ProZ staff should have access to.
I think I remember getting an e-mail from this web site about a month ago asking to register on their new portal (something I'm sure I didn't do), and I also remember wondering where they got hold of my e-mail address since I don’t publicly display it and the message wasn't sent through any of my “legitimate” profiles. I was so swamped with work at the time that I didn't pay enough attention to the alarm bell that went off inside my brain and simply hit the delete button. ▲ Collapse
| | | | | I did call to this thread, too | Jul 18, 2009 |
...right after posting here, as I had noticed that part of the information wasn't supposed to be accessible publicly.
Giuliana
| | | | RoxanaTrad (X)
Romania
Local time: 06:55
English to Romanian
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TOPIC STARTER | So, I am not alone... | Jul 18, 2009 |
Hello everyone,
I have been away all day and just got back. I was amazed to see the result of my topic, sorry for our misfortune but at the same time happy to see that we are a true community.
To Hans and Uldis- you are missing the point. It's not about my contact details, I don't really care if the world knows my name, my town, my degrees, job or where I went to school. It's like Ivana said and I QUOTE:
"It's not just a case of our details having been copied and posted ... See more Hello everyone,
I have been away all day and just got back. I was amazed to see the result of my topic, sorry for our misfortune but at the same time happy to see that we are a true community.
To Hans and Uldis- you are missing the point. It's not about my contact details, I don't really care if the world knows my name, my town, my degrees, job or where I went to school. It's like Ivana said and I QUOTE:
"It's not just a case of our details having been copied and posted elsewhere, but a case of identity fraud, where the new account-holder purports to be a professional translator (you, me or any one of our colleagues) for financial gain, with obvious consequences on our professional reputations." THAT IS WHAT I HATE.
Besides, these people are making money off our back. Let me remind you that I was contacted by an outsourcer to whom they offered services under MY NAME. Moreover, what if they have already done it (which is more than possible) and did a terrible job doing it. I may end up being walled for unprofessional feedback for what I know. I am aware that it sounds like paranoia but it is possible, isn't it??
The real problem is that we all seem to have been "cloned" somewhere for financial gains and that is WRONG, SO WRONG.
Good night everyone and I hope this incident will alert more people.
Regards. ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Most of the profile info is public and indexed by search engines | Jul 18, 2009 |
JaneTranslates wrote:
"My" profile there uses my ProZ.com nickname, and then lists my "real" name in a format that does not appear on any of the public-access pages of ProZ
Have you checked your old-format profile?
See this:
http://www.proz.com/translators/90274
I got to this page by clicking on the verified ID checkmark next to your user name, and then clicking on your name in the little pop-up window that appears. is it possible that they harvested the info from there, or they got it from your profile a long time ago, when that old profile format was active?
There are two immediate conclusions that we can draw, I think:
1. The link in the window that comes up when clicking the Verified ID checkmark should point to the current profile page (or whatever is the user's preferred setting), not the old version.
2. Profile info is public, indexed by search engines. There is nothing to do about it, except that there is a setting in the profile where you can disable search engine indexing of your profile page. That would probably prevent this sort of data harvesting, however, you would not show up in legitimate searches either.
The third thing is what to do to prevent this sort of data harvesting without missing out on legitimate searches.
Perhaps there is a solution where outside searches (Google searches, other non-logged in visitors) would result in displaying the profile info in a format that is not "harvestable", where the data cannot be extracted by a computer. For example an image that is still readable to the human eye, but would prevent a piece of software code to use the information to fill up a database, or alter it in any way. Logged-in users would have a different level of access.
To site staff: Is it something that would be technically feasible?
Katalin
[Edited at 2009-07-18 19:35 GMT]
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| Still not the same format. | Jul 18, 2009 |
Katalin Horvath McClure wrote:
JaneTranslates wrote:
"My" profile there uses my ProZ.com nickname, and then lists my "real" name in a format that does not appear on any of the public-access pages of ProZ
Have you checked your old-format profile?
See this:
http://www.proz.com/translators/90274
I got to this page by clicking on the verified ID checkmark next to your user name, and then clicking on your name in the little pop-up window that appears. is it possible that they harvested the info from there, or they got it from your profile a long time ago, when that old profile format was active?
No, Katalin, that's not the version of my name that's shown on Outsourceroom. I've always given my full name (Helen Jane Barnes de Ramírez) on my profile--still do--just so that people who know me by different names can verify that it's all the same person. However, in a support-ticket dialog with ProZ staff (I was trying to change my username without losing my Verified ID), I learned that the version of my name that ProZ has on record is a truncated version that I never use anywhere--the same truncated version that shows on Outsourceroom.
So, I still believe that this scam site has access to something that only ProZ staff is supposed to be able to see. But thanks for taking the trouble to check it out!
| | | | Uldis Liepkalns 
Latvia
Local time: 06:55
Member (2003)
English to Latvian
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I cannot tell about Hans, but seems you are answering to my first post, not the last...
Uldis
Roxana Cazacu wrote:
To Hans and Uldis- you are missing the point.
| | | | LuciaC
United Kingdom
Local time: 04:55
English to Italian
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| | Might be Elance as well | Jul 18, 2009 |
But I and my data have never been anywhere near that site. So in my case the data most likely came from Proz.
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avsie (X)
Local time: 05:55
English to French
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In my case, my name appears as it appears publicly on my ProZ profile. However, my city and province of residence appear on OutsourcingRoom, while they are not supposed to appear publicly on my ProZ profile. They are on record, I just chose not to publish them.
But how did OutsourcingRoom obtain such information, if not through a breach in security?
[Edited at 2009-07-19 04:44 GMT]
| | | | tazdog (X)
Spain
Local time: 05:55
Spanish to English
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| I'm there, too | Jul 19, 2009 |
Thanks for posting this, Roxana. I also found myself on Outsourcingroom and I have never created a profile there, nor have I ever had one on Elance.
To any of you who haven't found yourselves on Outsourcingroom by searching for your name: try searching for your Proz user name. My name does not come up when I search for it, but my user name does come up--and my real name along with it (as used here). My town is also shown, and I know for a fact that this is the ONLY site where... See more Thanks for posting this, Roxana. I also found myself on Outsourcingroom and I have never created a profile there, nor have I ever had one on Elance.
To any of you who haven't found yourselves on Outsourcingroom by searching for your name: try searching for your Proz user name. My name does not come up when I search for it, but my user name does come up--and my real name along with it (as used here). My town is also shown, and I know for a fact that this is the ONLY site where I have entered that information, so they obviously got the information from here. "My" profile on Outsourcingroom is empty except for user name/name/location.
When I force the "visitor view" of my profile here, I don't see my user name, so I thought that information was not available to the public. ??? ▲ Collapse
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We have a pretty large sample of people who have found their copied information on this site. Has anyone NOT found theirs? Or should we simply assume that every single registered translator on Proz has had their identity hijacked :-S
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RoxanaTrad (X)
Romania
Local time: 06:55
English to Romanian
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TOPIC STARTER
Uldis Liepkalns wrote:
I cannot tell about Hans, but seems you are answering to my first post, not the last...
Uldis
Roxana Cazacu wrote:
To Hans and Uldis- you are missing the point.
You are right Uldis, it seems I missed your last post. Sorry. I guess I was so astonished by the magnitude of this (how should we call it??) problem, situation(?) that I seem to find it as a regular now every time someone else posts to join us. How sad is that?
| | | | Geraldine Oudin (X)
United Kingdom
Japanese to French
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Arianne Farah wrote:
We have a pretty large sample of people who have found their copied information on this site. Has anyone NOT found theirs? Or should we simply assume that every single registered translator on Proz has had their identity hijacked :-S
I have NOT found my profile on this sitem if this can help anyone find why certain profiles are targetted and not others (not that I want to be a target...). Language combinaison?
| | | | AWa (X)
Local time: 05:55
English to German
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Despite my demand to remove my profile it is still there, even "better": it was moved to the top of the list that appears when searching for my surname.
I repeated my request to delete the profile through the channels given on the site (contact us and report a bug) and will wait one more day before sending a notice to the site owner.
[Edited at 2009-07-19 06:32 GMT]:
Thanks for posting the information here, Uldis.
[Edited at 2009-07-19 06:4... See more Despite my demand to remove my profile it is still there, even "better": it was moved to the top of the list that appears when searching for my surname.
I repeated my request to delete the profile through the channels given on the site (contact us and report a bug) and will wait one more day before sending a notice to the site owner.
[Edited at 2009-07-19 06:32 GMT]:
Thanks for posting the information here, Uldis.
[Edited at 2009-07-19 06:47 GMT]:
I also removed most of the information from my profile here at proz. I know it is useless now, but I hope data miners will think so, too
[Edited at 2009-07-19 06:48 GMT] ▲ Collapse
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