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ChoicePoint Identity Theft Fallout Widens
dstates writes "A unique California law forced ChoicePoint to reveal that a break-in had compromised accounts revealing personal information on 40,000 southern californians and leading to more than 750 cases of identity theft. The company initially denied that the break-in compromised consumers outside of California, but CNN is now reporting that 110,000 accounts nationally have been compromised. 'The irony appears to be that ChoicePoint has not done its own due diligence in verifying the identities of those 'businesses' that apply to be customers,' said Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. 'They're not doing the very thing they claim their service enables their customers to achieve.'"
ChoicePoint: "Who goes there?"
Voice: "Thurston Howell III"
ChoicePoint: "A likely story!"
Voice: "Sherlock Holmes"
ChoicePoint: "We weren't born yesterday!"
Voice: "Landshark"
ChoicePoint: "That's better, here's 35,000 files, let us know if you need anymore."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Serirously- this isn't paperclips these people are selling ITS YOUR PERSONAL DATA. They need to be closed, and whoever responsible needs to go to jail- and everyone involved in covering up the crime deserves to live in poverty for the rest of their fucking lives.
Well, funny that you mention that. What computer cracker goes into a network and *only* steals the data for 1 state?? No one! Choicepoint was flat out lieing and being unfair to the consumer by stating that only California was affected. It was only when the heat was turned on them by the news media & the internet bloggers that they admitted that more people were affected & would be notified.
How does someone determine if Choicepoint had data on them?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
What really upsets me is how they originally denied that anyone outside of California had their informaion comprimised.
If they did that, it would cost them business. That would cost them profit. They're a company. Next question?
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
"leading to more than 750 cases of identity theft." I wonder how many total cases of identity theft this incident will cause.
The only way to know is to notify all people that had their identity stolen. All 50 states need to have a ID theft law like California.
This is what you get when consumer information is obtained and stored behind a cloak of secrecy. This is what you get when privacy laws are not enforced or valued. This is what you get when the standard consumer is ignorant and apathetic to the importance of person information.
"The company initially denied that the break-in compromised consumers outside of California"
Did they actually deny that no one outside of California was compromised, or was it just that they weren't legally obligated to inform anyone outside of the state? From Monday's story, I got the distinct impression that it was the latter (i.e., no legal obligation), rather than outright deception. Regardless, it's still a really crappy thing to have happened.
(on a personal note, given that the break-in happened months ago, and i just got my yearly free credit reports from the 3 agencies and didn't see anything suspicious, I guess I'm a lucky SoCalifornian...)
These kinds of California "sunshine" laws are also the only reason we found out about Enron before it took the whole US economy, not just Houston, down with it. Enron was required by California law, under their misnamed "deregulation" system, to open its books, because it was supplying a lot of energy to Californians. Enron refused, claiming that, as a Texas company, it was not under California jurisdiction. That was when Governor Davis famously asked the Federal Department of Energy to step in, to resolve this interstate conflict. The DOE refused to referee, and Davis eventually found other means to force open Enron's books. When they were reviewed, not only was $8B in California overcharges revealed, but the entire network of Enron debt-laundering was exposed. As well as the rest of their system-gaming that took them out.
California is far from perfect. But their 35M consumers are unusually well protected by laws in the public interest. The economy of California scale forces car makers around the country, and around the world, to comply with their higher standards. Perhaps we will see California's own self interest protect us from other scams like these, as we all get closer to the Golden State.
--
make install -not war
I love the way marketing companies have more access to my personal information than I do. Moreover, they're among the "legitimate" businesses who the company claims it sells information to -- any dick and harry spammer joint can be called a "marketing company". In other words, if you have enough money to pour down their gullet, you have the information.
The company says its records enable law enforcers to track down serial killers and have helped find 822 missing children.
Yeah, since they help children, they cannot be an irresponsible company.
"The topic of the responsible use of information is a vital one to our society ... we support a national debate on this very topic," ChoicePoint President Doug Curling said.
Classic tangential marketspeak response from the president.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Well, I just got your credit report from the 3 agencies, and I feel obliged to tell you that with an average FICO score of 559, you probably shouldn't be calling yourself lucky.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Checkpoint Client Verification = Did the check clear? Is yes then WELCOME ABOARD!
Actually, you can receive a copy of your profile.
This page on the ChoicePoint web site points to Choicetrust. (Insert joke about the mane choice here)
From the Choicepoint web site:
FACT Act Compliance
The Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACT Act) was enacted in 2003 and amends the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), a federal law that regulates, in part, who is permitted to access your consumer report information and how it can be used. The FACT Act entitles consumers to obtain one free copy of his/her consumer file from certain consumer reporting agencies during each 12-month period.
ChoicePoint has three separate companies that maintain consumer files that are subject to the free disclosure requirement: C.L.U.E. Inc. maintains information on insurance claims histories, ChoicePoint WorkPlace Solutions Inc. maintains employment history information, and Resident Data Inc. maintains tenant history information. Each of these companies designed an easy process for consumers to request their free file disclosure.
Please note that a consumer file does not necessarily exist for you with any one of the three companies. For example, if you have not filed a claim with your auto or home insurance company during the last five years, we will not have a report on you. If you have not applied for employment with a customer that we serve, we likely will not have an employment history report on you. If you have not submitted a residential lease application with a customer that we serve, we will likely not have a tenant history report on you.
To request copies of your claims history report, visit www.ChoiceTrust.com or call 1-866-312-8076.
To request a copy of your employment history report, call 1-866-312-8075.
To request a copy of your tenant history report, call 1-877-448-5732.
If you would prefer to send your request by mail, please send your name and address to the appropriate address below. A report request form will be sent to you to complete and return.
For claims history reports:
ChoicePoint Consumer Disclosure Center
P.O. Box 105295
Atlanta, GA 30348
For employment history reports:
ChoicePoint WorkPlace Solutions Consumer Disclosure Center
P.O. Box 105292
Atlanta, GA 30348
For tenant history reports:
Resident Data Consumer Disclosure Center
P.O. Box 850126
Richardson, TX 75085-0126
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I'm an Oregonian... so you know it takes a lot for me to say anything nice about California but...
I just want to thank California for their identity fraud laws that force businesses to disclose when an unauthorized person has accessed records illegally. If it weren't for that, we probably wouldn't know anything about this.
They were reporting California because they had absolutely no choice in the matter because of legal requirements in California. It's a very good thing for all people who have information at Choicepoint that California has that law. Otherwise I have little doubt any of us would know about it.
I do wonder if it would be beneficial to indentity thieves to expressly avoid stealing information about California residents to limit knowledge of their efforts. If those 100K people weren't notified by Choicepoint, it'd give them a lot more freedom to exploit that pile of information.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
ust wait for a letter from a law firm informing you that you are a member of the class action suit against ChoicePoint.
optional additional steps:
2. Do nothing.
3. Profit!!!
Profit??? You'd get a coupon for 20% off your next Choicepoint break-in!
I wish we were all crap-rejecting citizens. But the fact is that these laws protect consumers, who corporations prize, not simply citizens, who corporations ignore. They're "consumer protection laws". The corporate execs like Ken Lay and his California office minions aren't as well protected by these laws, because they're citizens, not consumers. That's how we've got a fighting chance.
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make install -not war
That they're announcing that they're 'only' informing 100,000 other US residents can be explained in any of the following ways:
- The attacks were focused on CA residents, for some reason.
- They have only identified 100,000 people this week, and there's another 3 weeks of work to do.
- They are willfully underreporting the actual numbers and hoping that nobody will do the research to prove them wrong.
- Given that the law doesn't require them to inform everybody who got hit, they're only informing those non CA residents who got hit the worst. 2/3 of the people who would have been informed under CA law will never know...
The most interesting information is between the lines. Learn to read there more often. ("Diplomacy is the art of telling a lion 'Nice kitty kitty' while you search for a big rock. Media relations is doing for a company what a diplomat does for a country.")Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Meanwhile, in that Bastion of Truth, Justice and the Liberty, Washington DC, George W. Bush signs The Class Action Fairness Act of 2005
<sarcasm>at least america is safe from gay weddings</sarcasm>
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Does anyone else realize that this is the same company that essentially handed over the 2000 election to George W. Bush? They are the ones who were hired by the florida voting commission to compare the data on federal criminals in the US with those in FL so that the FL federal criminals couldn't vote. Only they botched (on purpose?) it up completely and had a 5% accuracy rate resulting in thousands of voters (mostly black) getting turned away at the polls. Coincidentally (yeah, right) they were awarded a 60 million dollar data sorting job in Iraq once the war started. Funny, if they failed so miserably in FL why would you reward them with a bid in Iraq? This company is a joke.
The ChoicePoint security fiasco is part of a larger problem -- the fact that companies dealing in personal data are not providing adequate security and that they are not well regulated. What makes matters worse is that ChoicePoint is increasingly supplying its information to the government, including the FBI and IRS.
. 16.04.html
t al-Person.htm
Back in December 2004, I along with the Electronic Privacy Information Center wrote a letter to the FTC arguing that the FTC should open an investigation of ChoicePoint: http://www.epic.org/privacy/choicepoint/fcraltr12
This letter might be of interest, as it explains the extensiveness of the data companies like ChoicePoint have and how it affects people's lives.
I also argued in my new book, THE DIGITAL PERSON: TECHNOLOGY AND PRIVACY IN THE INFORMATION AGE, that identity theft and other privacy problems are caused not by technology but by irresponsible business practices. Everybody seems to be saying that in today's world of information technology, privacy is dead. The culprit is technology, and since it is foolish to believe that it can be stopped, there's little hope. I argue that this isn't the case. The culprit is government and business practices. There's a "digital person" that is a counterpart to people, not composed of flesh and blood but of bits and bytes of personal information gathered together in databases. The digital person is a representation of ourselves in the world of computers. But this is only part of the story. Increasingly, decisions about us are made by looking to our digital person. What happens to our digital person in the digital world is increasingly having effects in realspace to our real person. It is this problem that I explore, and I argue that the answer is regulating government and businesses - not technology. For those interested in learning more, I encourage you to read the FTC letter as well as my book. Here's the book's website: http://www.law.gwu.edu/facweb/dsolove/Solove-Digi
- Derek V. Smith (CEO)
is your man. Also available via Google:Phone: (770) 752-0881
Address: 15120 N Valleyfield Rd, Alpharetta, GA 30004
- David Lee (Executive VP)
- David W. Davis (Corp. Sec and VP, Government Affairs)
So, if any um... parents of those 822 missing children recovered would like to call and, uh... thank them, well, there you go.Phone: (770) 594-7838, (770) 594-9090
Address: 230 Ridge Point Ct, Alpharetta, GA 30022
Phone: (678) 366-9445
Address: 3325 Cedar Farms Ct, Alpharetta, GA 30004
Don't worry. . .there is new legislation on the president's desk right now that will make it "virtually impossible now to get a nationwide class-action suit off the ground." -- The Economist
Attention all K-Mart Shoppers... that Bar-B-Q you are smelling is your collective butts in the fire.
After undermining all sane separations between state, religion, and commerce, we find ourselve in what can only be described as a Nation of the Corporation, By the Corporation, and For the Corporation. You may now bow to your corporate masters.
Our founding fathers saw government as a detestable necessity, so they wisely hamstrung it seven ways come Sunday, to keep it at bay. By giving corporations the same rights as "REAL FLESH AND BLOOD PEOPLE", without the same accontabilitiies or limitations, we created a monster. That monster was further allowed free access to influence and ultimately control our government. That brings us where we are today.
A nation where your privacy is a farce, virtually nonexistent, while government and corporations alike enjoy almost complete opacity.
Just last week a Federal Judge ruled in favor of the Governor of Maryland, in a suit involving reporters from the Sun Times being frozen out of press meetings. The Judge ruled that "the paper wrongly asserted a greater right to access to government officials than private citizens have. The right to publish news is expansive. However, the right does not carry with it the unrestrained right to gather information,"
In short, A political leader, your elected representative, has the right to inform only those he likes or feels fit to inform. That and your primary organ of political enlightenment, the press, has no special right to garner information on your behalf. Add to that the recent $400,000 charge for FIA documents against the justice department, and the Gannon/Guckert debacle at the White House this week, and it's clear... the Government is hell bent on having it's citizens standing naked in the streets, stripped of every right to privacy and personal dignity, while they plot and practice "God only knows what" with complete impunity.
The information disaster at ChoicePoint underlines the complete disregard that business and the Government have for the needs and the rights of every day citizens. Recent leaks suggest the final number of people exposed may exceed 400,000. If the government were working on your behalf, you would certainly see heads rolling immediately. However, I suspect you'll see none of that. The government is using these very companies to perform an endrun around the constitution, filling up government dosiers with information collected by these very companies, at the same time lucrative government contracts and multimillion dollar campaign funds are trading hands.
We're at a critical time in history. Benito Mussolini defined fascism as "The Corporate State". Looking at the historical analysis of the last century, there's good reason why conservative and liberal law makers, educators in law and political science, and men of conscience around the world are calling the United States a fascist state. One of the certain casualties in such a government, are the rights and freedom of the individual. We still have a tremendous amount of infrastructure that protects us, and as bad as things are, no single person has yet amassed so much power that our government can be easily toppled. We're however in extreme danger. It'll take all our commitment, and every kind of contribution we as citizens can make, to bring our government back into it's proper place as an engine designed to promote the advancement of freedom, and justice. The alternative is too grim for words.
Genda