I didn't apply to refinance my home, but... ?

First off, take a deep breath. You haven't had any information ripped off and you aren't a victim of identity theft. In fact, I get 6-10 of these refinance or mortgage offers every day in my mailbox, and they're all just fishing attempts from people who get paid a finder's fee from these mortgage companies if they bring in business.

How do they know the amount of your original mortgage? Probably it's just an inspired guess, actually, but believe it or not, the amount of your loan is a matter of public record. I know this because I also get a few letters every week offering to refinance my home loan and they list the address of our property (obviously, since I get it in the mail) along with the amount of our original loan.

At first this bothered me, but when I realized that there wasn't any collusion or theft of my loan payment documents, I realized it's just another example of how the Internet has taken already publicly available information and made it much, much easier to find. The result? Companies and people you've never heard of know far more about you than you might ever expect.

One example is the controversial Spock.com site, which aggregates personal information about everyone and makes them available as "profiles". If it were all accurate it'd be scary, but the fact that it's typically inaccurate...

Anyway, suffice to say that you don't need to worry about the mortgage refinance messages because you haven't lost any of your privacy, at least not online. Whether you have lost some of your privacy in this brave new world of the twenty-first century, well, that's a different debate entirely.