Technology and easy credit give identity thieves an edge

One in six adults in Arizona had their identities stolen in the last five years, about twice the national rate.
The New York Times

The story "Technology and easy credit give identity thieves an edge" published May 30, 2006 at 5:08 AM is no longer available on CNET News.

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[dargon19888]

Some sad truths...

1) Corporate greed weighs in that the risk of credit fraud is much smaller than the potential gain of new customers.

2) Identity Theft does more harm to the individual than to the credit card companies.

3) Personal information that is retained by "trusted" sources have outsourced portions of their operations to offshore companies which are outside of our laws and harder to trace and prove that they are the source of identity theft. This puts the individual at more risk, while having minimal impact/repercussions to the company that violated the trust in the first place.

4) There needs to be control on how much of the public records are readily available to the public.

[zeroplane]

Make companies responsible for paying

If you want corporations to support the concepts make laws that require corporations who increase the possibility of identify theft have to pay for the cost to consumers and customers should their accounts be used. Have the federal and state governments regulate the corporations and require the corporations to have department dedicated to managing and investigating fraud. Then suddenly the corporations would increase and support said ideas to reduce costs.

Right now the corporations are not on the hook to pay for the results of their messy record keeping. Because of this they will not care.

[CancerMan2]

Wouldn't You Call This An Epidemic?

"...about 10 million Americans--1 in 30--had their identities stolen in the previous year"

If something unpleasant or unwanted affects 10 million people a year, wouldn't you call than an epidemic? CNET should have written the headline as "Nationwide epidemic of identity theft. Govt. fiddles while Rome burns".

Face it, nobody who works for the companies and institutions that "leak" consumer data ever goes to jail. It doesn't even really cost them money, they just pass the losses through to the shills, err I mean consumers, in the form of higher interest rates and transaction fees. So of course the problem just keeps getting bigger, is there any reason it wouldn't? The government doesn't really care because there is no partisan spin to this problem, and no mass marches in the streets for change.

If you want to protect your own privacy, then the most practical thing you could do would be to buy fake documentation from street peddlers, like the illegals do. Use that for routine transactions. That way if it is stolen, who cares, it's already been stolen once, twice, three times. Basically, we need disposable identities.