Fictional story of a person worrying over his personal information being given away or easily viewed online as someone else’s information.

“I go to the website and sign up for an account. They ask for my name, address, phone number, and sex. They wanted much more information, so I gave it to them.” I took a breath and typed the last piece of information, male.”One example of a further detail they wanted pertained to the standing of my finances. I gave the state of my income, credit rating, and social security number to this site or its developer. As always, I didn’t know where my private data would end up at.

“Being a freelance journalist, I want to get my work seen by as many readers as possible. 28 different social networks I signed up with at that point, 12 or 13 after.

“It would have gone on that way as long as one of the sites didn’t have a user mess with my identity.

“Then the first indication I knew that happened was revealed anonymously under a different name. I was on that one site searching for articles related to the one I had posted on an earlier date, when I found my article on this site linked to the one I published it on, under someone else’s name.

”A second article of mine was being displayed under an undesired pseudonym and the user profile was close to mine, except she had put that she was married.

“The third straw fell not too long after. 45 disparate people used my 25 stories or reports as if they were their own property.

“I could have but I didn’t want to bring that many people to court. Instead, I just intended to find out what was going on with the company. ‘Were they giving away my materials to anyone who lined up for them?’

E-mailing sometimes takes a little longer than snail-mail or plain phoning it in, to get the expected response.

Ulmar was on the phone. “Sir, tell me what are you having a problem with on our site?”

“I guess my problem is related to identity theft.”

“O.K., what is your identity theft-related problem?”

“Well, the reasons why that sentence needs to be corrected by putting an ‘s’ at the end of it; The 4 to 5 people who used 25 of my written materials.”