Information given at cash registers may put you at risk

If you go shopping and have a Facebook or other social networking sites, your life has just gotten more dangerous.

Store cashiers are using personal information provided by customers to contact the shoppers on online social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace without permission, according to officials in Camden County.

Usually the cashier finds the customer attractive and contacts them to establish a connection or relationship, officials said.

Many cashiers at stores across the nation will ask for a name, e-mail address or home address from the customer when they are ringing them up.  While this information is usually not required to make a purchase, rather for coupons or other promotional e-mails, customers generally feel obligated to provide the information.

Some cashiers will then take the information and search for and contact the customer on a social networking site hoping to establish the connection with them.

Heather DiBenedetto, 18, of Lumberton, N.J., was at the cash register in a local Target store when an older, male cashier asked to see her driver’s license as a form of identification for her credit card.

“It was weird when the cashier stared at my license for a long time,” DiBenedetto said. “Later on that night, I found a message on my personal Facebook from the employee. He must have memorized my name when I was checking out.”

As wrong as it seems for a cashier to take a customer’s personal information provided under the assumption it would be used for business purposes, it is surprisingly legal across the nation, according to former Assistant U.S. Attorney Joshua Drew of Camden, N.J.

“Anyone would clearly agree that what these employees are doing is wrong, not to mention creepy and inappropriate, but it does not violate the federal identity theft statute,” Drew said. “There is no law in the identity theft statute that relates to social networking sites.”

Congress has not developed any federal laws to deal with offenses committed on social networking sites like Facebook, because the sites are such new technology.

“It’s like when credit cards were first developed,” Drew said. “There were originally very few if any laws detailing the offenses for someone who stole another’s credit card number. Now there are many punishments for identity theft of that sort.”

Additionally, it does not help that Facebook and MySpace do not monitor users when they message another user. There is no way the Web site can tell if one person obtained another individual’s information in an inappropriate manner, such as from their place of work, according to the site’s privacy pages.

As long as someone has your name, they are able to contact you on Facebook, regardless of whether the contact was solicited or not, according to police.

“Even giving someone your e-mail address is a slippery slope,” said IRS Special Agent Rob Glantz of Cherry Hill, N.J. “Anyone can take it and use it to get more information about you.  At least you can shred bank documents and credit statements, but once you verbally give someone your name or email address at a business, they potentially have it forever. You can’t take it back.”

While this scandal seems to typically involve older male clerks targeting younger women that they find attractive and want to contact, FBI Special Agent Kevin Kane of Cherry Hill, N.J. said there are no statistics of the young women who have their personal information violated through the misuse of business information on Facebook. This is simply because these cases aren’t reported.

Even if these incidents were reported, Kane admits that they would likely not be investigated.

“We just don’t have the people to investigate minor occurrences,” Kane said. “Only a manger of a store could reprimand an employee for taking business information for their personal use. It’s really left up to the customer to be extremely cautious when providing any sort of information to a store cashier.”