Have you looked at your home security system bill lately? Have you ever wondered exactly what kind of service you're receiving for your monthly fee? Me too!

I've had ADT for nearly four years, faithfully paying them $37 a month, every month. And when I first started with them, I got good service. In my city, the police do not respond to home alarms. Instead, ADT has a list of numbers to call when an alarm goes off.

If they do not reach me, they're supposed to dispatch the "guard service." If they do reach me, I have the option of having the guard respond or not. If the guard is dispatched to the house, the guard is supposed to survey the perimeter of the house to look for obvious signs of a break-in, like a broken window or door. If everything looks okay, the guard leaves with no further action. If there is evidence of a break-in, the guard calls the police. Everything used to go like clockwork, and I had no complaints.

Beyond belief, it's starting to become fashionable to visit places for the enjoyment of watching the local menfolk brandish deadly weapons. In Italy, soldiers in body armor were recently deployed to stand vigil around potential terrorist sites. The Financial Times reports that in Rome, where a thousand of them appeared this summer, patrolmen quickly became tourist fodder in their own right.

It's not just in Italy, either. There is almost no other reason to visit the border between North and South Korea than to gaze in admiration at the trigger-happy sentries who mill along the DMZ, and yet each day of the week, coach tourists make the day-trip from Seoul to do just such a thing. (Of course, it doesn't always work out -- in July, one clueless tourist was shot dead by North Korean soldiers after she wandered away from her border resort.)

Berlin's Checkpoint Charlie, an emblem for oppression and woe when it was a militarized link between East and West Berlin, is now a tacky tourist ghetto where visitors pose for snapshots with actors dressed in fake army getups. Old-timers are outraged -- there's no museum there to supply context.

And why not? Cops are plentiful, intentionally conspicuous, and above all, free to admire. And often, their style varies as much as the cultures they protect. These days, a locale's demonstrations of defense says as much about its modern society as its cuisine.

Wesabe is an amazing useful personal finance site which provides access to all of your checking and savings accounts under one site in order to better track your finances. I had a chance to chat with Marc Hedlund, the CEO of Wesabe about security, user rights, features, upcoming and the community focus of this excellent site. This article is longer than our normal fare but stick with it if you want to get to know your money using a cool online tool.

The first thing you'll want to know before handing over your banking information to a company is how secure they are. Wesabe provides its users with industry standard encryption to protect your financial data. Unlike their competitor, Mint who uses a third party to handle security and data Wesabe has taken the processes in house and developed their own system. The decision is actually a great one when it comes to security and the rights you have over your data. Marc shared with me that one of the main reasons they built their own system was to be able to offer users a Data Bill of Rights, allowing you to completely delete your data at any time, something third party vendors would have kept. Aside from keeping your passwords and financial information from a company you don't have a business relationship with the Wesabe system also has the ability to get updates about your transactions as often as your bank provides updates providing you with more accurate information.

Another cool feature of being a Wesabe user is that there are currently 4 ways to upload your data based on how much information you want to trust Wesabe with. Three of these methods don't require that you provide Wesabe with any of your banking credentials and the fourth is an automatic uploader which logs in and updates your account information throughout the day after you provide your login information to Wesabe. Many users begin with the manual upload and as their trust in Wesabe grows, move to more automatic methods of uploading. The fully automatic uploader came about from user requests and is the method that Marc uses to upload to Wesabe.

In response to the recent story I wrote about the security of Mint.com a reader tipped me off on another personal finance tool which looks pretty useful. Billeo is a free program whose "Bill Pay Assistant" feature lets users set up reminders for their many bills and can log them into the site in order to make the payment from their preferred source of funds. Billeo even lets users save copies of the confirmation page, which makes keeping track of your finances a snap, and beats the analog method pictured to the right.

Billeo's biggest strength is that it leverages the security and payment methods already in place by those companies you do business with. When it is time to log in and make a payment, Billeo doesn't handle the actual transaction; it simply logs you into the existing payment site for the bill you are paying. As for the security of your information Billeo is using 128 bit encryption which is standard in the industry and your actual information is stored locally on your PC with the same encryption.

I am definitely going to have to check out adding Billeo to my personal finance toolkit as soon as they roll out support for Firefox 3, which is my browser of choice. Even though I have automated most of my bill payment there are a few which cannot be automated, for which a great reminder service would be useful. There's nothing worse than paying a company an extra $40 because your payment is a day late!

Mint.com is a personal finance site which provides the ability for you to link together all of the parts of your financial life. In order for the service to work you need to provide all of your banking passwords and account numbers to Mint so that it can work all of its behind the scenes magic. With a treasure trove of financial information like this sitting in one place, you'll want to be sure that your information is secure. Ryan Taylor of Money Millionaire Habits did just that and has provided a simple rundown of the security features utilized by Mint.com to protect your money.

First off, it is important to note that you don't make any transactions from inside Mint, which affords solace to some wary users. The most impressive piece of information about Mint.com's security is that the back end that runs Mint, called Yodlee, is also used by many of the top banks in the industry. All of these precautions should combine to give most users the same sense of security when using Mint.com to manage their personal finances as they have with their own bank.

Even though I am part of the younger generation which seems at time to jump on new technology, I have been hesitant to start using any of these third party online budgeting systems mainly due to security. Thankfully, it appears that my fears were unfounded and Mint.com appears to be using good policies and software to safeguard users' information and money. Stay tuned, in the near future I'll be looking into the security behind a Mint.com competitor, Wesabe.

Score another one for the Transportation Security Administration... It's making it even more inconvenient for travelers. Lucky passengers in 10 major United States airports can have the pleasure of the TSA seeing them naked. No, I'm not kidding. Travelers in cities like Los Angeles and New York might win the travel lottery and be selected to enter a glass booth to have a three-dimensional image taken of their bodies.

The technology essentially lets the TSA see through people's clothes, and gives nice pictures of your body, including your private parts. It's done with "millimeter waves" which are intended to help the TSA identify any weapons or foreign objects you might be concealing.

The TSA says that passengers will have a choice: They can either let an agent give them a physical pat-down, or they can allow this image of their body to be taken. That sounds nice, but how far is too far? I think this has definitely gone too far. And make no mistake, the next step is making these images mandatory and offering passengers no choice.

Fear not Hannaford customers, as long as you act quickly and responsibly, you can recover your financial future.

Supermarket chain Hannaford Bros. announced earlier this week that the company had experienced a security breach potentially exposing more than four million credit card numbers, debit card numbers and expiration dates. And while the supermarket chain says that it is working with credit and debit card companies to make things right, customers are probably wondering what kind of risk they face and what they need to do right now.

As Tom Barlow wrote earlier today on WalletPop, there are some excellent advantages to shopping online. But even though shopping online has been big for years now, a lot of people are still worried about security, namely identity theft.

Happily, today's Wall Street Journal has some tips (subscription required) to help you stay safe and secure during your web-aided shopping adventures. The tips are update your security software, determine if the store is legit, avoid crazy good deals, try a temporary card number (talk to your issuer for information on that), and verify your bank's emails.

When you're shopping online, stick with reputable sites that everyone uses: You can buy pretty much anything on Amazon.com these days, and avoid person to person sites.

And ya know those pop-ups that tell you you won a $500 gift certificate to Best Buy? If it sounds to good to be true, it probably is...