ID Theft In US Continues Apace Despite Data Breach Laws

4roddas points out an article at Techworld about the continued scourge of identify theft in the US, which begins: "Over the past five years, 43 US states have adopted data breach notification laws, but has all of this legislation actually cut down on identity theft? Not according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University who have published (PDF) a state-by-state analysis of data supplied by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC). 'There doesn't seem to be any evidence that the laws actually reduce identity theft,' said Sasha Romanosky, a Ph.D student at Carnegie Mellon who is one of the paper's authors. Since 1999 the FTC has invited identity theft victims to log information about their cases on its Web site. The data are then made accessible to law enforcement, which uses the information to help analyze crime trends."

Comments

And this is why the executives at Microsoft should

[Growlor]

be fired by the stockholders (I know bashing Microsoft in Slashdot - imagine that!) But seriously, they were in the perfect position to become this. They had the money and they had the universal presence to pull it off. But they proved themselves to be such untrustworthy, scheming pricks that noone in their right mind would follow along. Talk about a missed opportunity. Maybe Google will realize they still have a chance to do this. So far they seem to have done a decent job resisting the temptation to completely abuse the data they already have on us. They are probably the best hope for us here.