A New York PIRG report "survey of 275 airline, travel-agency, hotel and car-rental Web sites found that many of them ask for an excessive amount of personal information in the process of making a sale." according to the story Warning issued on identity theft by Dan Osburn in the Ithaca Journal. Also check out NYPIRG's website cyberstreetsmart.org.

Meanwhile, in the green mountains across the Hudson, VPIRG and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders {I-VT) are challenging plans by the mega-behemoth Verizon to purchase Unicel, a smaller wireless provider. This week, in response to a petition from VPIRG, the FCC granted a 90 day extension of the comment period on the sale. From the story FCC extends sale of Unicel by Neal Goswami in the Bennington Banner:

Verizon announced in July that it wanted to acquire Unicel, owned by Rural Cellular Corp., a smaller company that serves mainly rural areas in Vermont and 14 other states in a $2.7 billion deal.

Burns said VPIRG is seeking conditions that would require Verizon Wireless to provide universal coverage of the state, allow Unicel customers to exchange their phones for comparable Verizon handsets, and commit to national pricing standards and reasonable roaming rates for the state. Sanders, who has also been pushing for those conditions, said the two companies are the only cell phone carriers with significant resources in Vermont. If Verizon is allowed to take over Unicel's customers it will create a "de facto monopoly" in the state that could have a negative impact on the state's economy, he said. "Vermonters must take a very close look at what a Verizon Wireless monopoly would mean in terms of progress towards universal service at reasonable prices," Sanders said Wednesday.