Originally published June 25 2005
Consumers may not know much about identity theft, but neither do corporations, says columnist
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
A columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer points out that even though surveys show consumers don't know how to protect their information, businesses like LexisNexis and Citigroup show they also don't know how.
Consumers hardly can go a week without some reminder to safeguard against identity theft - like the new Annenberg Public Policy Center study showing that half of all Americans are clueless about basic online ruses.
But what about the companies that earn millions in profits handling consumers' data by the billions of bytes?
Well, those retailers, financial firms, and information brokers have been alarmingly slow to get religion, too.
Consider the stunning disclosure last week that personal information on 3.9 million Citigroup customers was boxed up, and then lost in transit by United Parcel Service.
Yet the typical method for moving sensitive consumer data around the country - between financial institutions and credit-rating agencies, in particular - is shipping it, unencrypted, just as Citigroup did.
There may be no way to outsmart every thief who wants to get his hands on consumer information, in order to perpetrate identity-theft schemes.
But businesses need to do a far better job of handling data safely.
At a minimum, that should mean industrywide encryption of sensitive data no matter how it's shipped.
Many thousands more businesses have yet to take the first steps necessary to safeguard data through electronic means.
That's why data-security experts hail the recent public disclosures - by Citigroup, data brokers ChoicePoint and LexisNexis, Bank of America, and others - as embarrassing episodes that might prompt change.
Businesses need to realize there's a public-relations price to be paid when their customers learn data has been mishandled.
The recent disclosures point up the need for national legislation requiring firms to issue alerts to data losses.
One proposal for a $1,000 per-record fine would make data security an overnight top priority if it became law.
Alerting consumers quickly when firms mishandle their personal information is a must.
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