Slashdot Mirror
Big ID Thefts Not To Be Feared
goldseries writes "A
new study released by ID Analytics says that only about 1 out of every 1000 stolen identities are actually used, due to the amount of time it takes to use the identity, limiting a single thief to 250 identities a year. The likelihood that your information will be used increases drastically when the size a the theft is small. So size does not matter, in identity thefts at least; the identity thefts you need to worry about aren't the big ones heard on the news but the small unreported ones." From the article: "While the findings will provide some comfort to consumers whose credit cards are lost or lifted, or whose sensitive information is compromised when, for instance, a laptop is stolen, as recently happened at Chicago-based Boeing, some of ID Analytics' suggestions could be controversial. The company suggests, for instance, that companies shouldn't always notify consumers of data breaches because they may be unnecessarily alarming people who stand little chance of being victimized."
Unless the companies who lost the information are willing to be liable for any and all damages caused by the identity theft, not limitted to damaged credit ratings, credibility damage, and all monetary losses, they should definitely inform consumers. That would be like not informing people of airplane safety measures "because very few planes actually crash."
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
So those of you that *actually* suffer identity theft... well, you are just a small, inconsequential number of people compared to those who got lucky. Since you are so outnumbered we can safely continue to fail to safeguard your data, and we will use these results to claim it is your fault, not ours, that you suffered identity theft. After all, you are only one in a thousand, right? Heck, losing a tenth of a percentage of our customers won't hurt *us* that much... and all this notification stuff is hurting us *much* more than that.
Sig under construction since 1998.
Tell that to the thousands of people who had their lives turned upside down. The effects of identity theft can be devastating and long lasting. If your data is stolen, you have every right to know about it. This is just an attempt for companies to downplay their incompetence and lack of security. I'd like to see how they would react if their information was stolen.
gasmonso http://religiousfreaks.com/My home fax machine is one digit off from that of an headhunter. Two nights ago I got a 20 page fax detailing the background check results for a candidate including:
Name
SSN
Address
Bank account numbers
Credit score
Arrest/conviction records: Federal State Local
Urinanalysis results
There was never a I never received a followup fax to check up on it - clearly they didn't have my phone number so they couldn't speak to me, but they already had a record of the fax number.
And if that wasn't dumb consider this.
My home phone number is one digit off from the States depart of Revenue unclaimed funds division. I routinely get calls from people asking "Is this the money line???" I get people leaving their name, address, SSN and phone number on my voice mail, unasked and please remember that the outbound message states the phone number and nothing else to indicate what the number is for. I get calls from people in state, out of state, out of the country, from prisons from other branches of the government.
Security is bullshit as long as people act retarded.
What concerns me lately is some of the faceless/nameless droids working in the call centers. After we called our Texas power company to transfer our service to a new address, we found out some time later that they added on another house in Dallas, as part of the same work order. Assigned my wife's social security number to the account, too. It's not just the databases that concern me, but the trustworthiness of the people taking my call.