A U.S. senator, campaigning for re-election, visited a
nursing home, where he approached an old fellow who was watching TV and
asked, “Do you know who I am?” The old man replied, “No,
but if you go to front desk they’ll tell you.”
Luckily for us, if we forget who we are, we can go to
ChoicePoint Inc., for they know all about all of us. This outfit is an
aggregator of personal information on just about everyone — its
computers hold 19 billion bits of sensitive info on nearly every American,
including our Social Security numbers, credit and medical histories, car
registrations, job applications, military records, lawsuits, and police
files.
ChoicePoint’s in the business of selling our
private information for a profit.
To whom does it sell? Banks, marketers, government
agencies, your boss . . . and practically anyone else willing to pay this
data broker’s fee — including, it turns out, criminals. In
February, it was reported that a ring of thieves had been allowed to open
accounts with ChoicePoint and extract volumes of personal data on as many
as half-a-million Americans. This information can be used for identity
theft, allowing thieves to drain the bank and credit-card accounts of their
victims.
Few of us are aware that these corporate data peddlers
have amassed so many details of our lives, much less that they operate with
almost no oversight and no requirements for security and privacy
protection. Indeed, ChoicePoint knew of the data theft in October but did
not inform the victims or law-enforcement officials. Only California
requires that the companies report such thefts, and even there, ChoicePoint
didn’t begin notifying potential victims until February . . . and the
notification was by mail! A spokesman says that the letters should arrive
“within a few weeks.”
This article appears in Mar 10-16, 2005.
