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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."
Plain and simple, the only thing that's going to really make a dent in identity theft is to make identities harder to steal, and that means requiring all the banks and credit card companies to jump through more identity verification hoops before they give someone your money or a line of credit in your name.
Sure, requiring you to go to a licensed notary and have a credit card application notarized might not make it so easy to get credit, but it would also make it harder to get credit in your name.
The banks and credit card companies could do this, but it's more profitable to let people steal your identity and then just jack up fees and interest rates to cover the losses.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Search your files for social security and credit card numbers before hackers do.
Data breach notification are useless when institutions don't know they've been breached. I'm sure there are lots of those cases.
Your credit card number is not a password, because you have to give it away every time you buy something. If someone wants to steal a credit card number, they can get it from any unscrupulous employee of any business that sells things, which means they'll always succeed. The solution is to replace credit cards with smart cards that use public-key cryptography. That means that your credit card contains a number which you can use to sign transactions and prove that you are authorized to make payments, but you don't have to give every employee of every merchant you buy from the power to impersonate you.
Social security numbers have the same problem, only worse, because you can't just cancel your SSN like you can with a credit card. Banks pretend that your SSN is a password, but there are thousands of people who have access to your social security number and at least one of them will sell it on the black market.
Fixing this mess will cost the banks a lot of money, but they made this mess and it's their responsibility to clean it up. We need the federal government to mandate real security measures, because fraud is quickly becoming the norm.
A long time ago, I wrote up a description of an identity clearinghouse, a government-run agency that allowed lenders to verify a potential borrower's identity without giving the lender any unnecessary information about the borrower's true identity. From the private citizen's side, it's all optional - register with the clearinghouse if you want, and go it alone if you want. From the lenders' side, it's mandatory to check with the clearinghouse before opening a line of credit for someone.
To register with the clearinghouse, you go to a local government agency where identity is "managed" - e.g., your local DMV. You register there by providing your current contact information, and they ensure that you are the person you claim to be through their normal identification procedures (such as picture ID/driver's license pictures on file). If you later need to change your contact info, you do the same procedure (going to the DMV in person) to prove your identity.
When you apply for credit somewhere, the lender first uses the identifying information you have provided to them (such as name, address, SS#, etc.) to verify your identity with the clearinghouse. If you haven't registered, the clearinghouse just responds that there's no such registrant in their records, and the lender is free to grant credit to the applicant. But if you have registered, the clearinghouse first checks to make sure the information they have on file matches the information the lender provides, and second, they use the information they have on file to contact you directly and ensure that you actually applied for credit with the lender in question. If both of those checks succeed, they respond to the lender with "yes", and if either fails, they tell the lender "no".
This would greatly reduce the instances of people opening lines of credit in other people's names. However, one problem it doesn't address is fraudulent charges to legitimate lines of credit you already have (e.g., stolen/copied credit cards). Credit card issuers and merchants are both often on the hook for most of those sorts of charges, though, so they already take at least some steps to reduce that kind of fraud.
The FBI is in charge of protecting Americans from fraud and theft on that scale and across that national and global jurisdiction. But Bush's "Justice" Department isn't interested.
Feel safer?
--
make install -not war
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ID theft will continue, now that criminals have about 4.5 million people's personal data from those backup tapes the Bank of New York lost. Not to mention all of the other data losses we've heard about on Slashdot. No amount of securing your personal data will help now, unless you plan on changing your date of birth and address. Seriously, that's all it takes. All it took to prove to Medicare (Australian health cover, just a shade short of socialised health) over the phone that I was me, when I needed to change some details, was my date of birth and current address. You put those on almost every form you fill out offline, and if you shop online, you put your address on those too. Date of birth and current address can be used as a lever to "update" someone's Medicare details, and have a new card sent to an ID thief. Medicare counts as a form of ID, so that makes the lever a little bit longer. An ID thief can use the new Medicare card as ID for other changes and updates. Even get a copy of a person's birth certificate sent to them.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
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#1:
laws, but has all of this legislation actually cut down on identity theft? Legislation does not stop crime. Prosecution stops crime. Besides, these laws are weak. They are unenforcable since they state "if you did something wrong, you must tell us" and obviously if they don't tell they don't get caught. And even if they do tell, there is nothing you can do to stop it and it doesn't make the companies any more likely to take security measures. So these bills are probably a good idea that doesn't go far enough.
#2:
I called Comcast today to register for service (yeah yeah, make fun of me, but they are the only game in town) and they asked me for my SSN. When I told them I couldn't do that, they hung-up on me. So this just shows me that not only is this business as usual, but it is getting worse. 10 years ago nobody would have dared ask for a social security number for something like this. How come things are getting worse while at the same time we are supposedly doing all this stuff to prevent identity theft?
Bottom line: nobody cares, nobody does anything about it. The only ones who do are academics and a vocal minority like Slashdot.