Competitive Intelligence

ChoicePoint: the Problem with Selling Personal Information... it's a Massive Homeland Security Vulnerability

Nice going... ChoicePoint, the Georgia company that boasts it has the deepest database in the nation, said that it had alerted 35,000 Californians that they were vulnerable, as required by state law, but balked at notifying a far larger number of potential victims outside California... about 145,000 in all! Last fall, hackers apparently used stolen identities to create businesses that then opened some 50 ChoicePoint accounts and used their newly-minted access to the world's largest personal information stockpile to steal the identities of at least a few of the people involved.

Do you think maybe these guys have a little too much power here?

Daniel Engber had some advice in Slate.com for those who believe they've been among the unlucky profiles ripped off as a result of ChoicePoint's security lapse:

Once your personal information has been stolen, there's no good way to get it back. You just hope the thief will move on to easier targets who haven't done the same paperwork you have. Changing your Social Security number is possible, but very difficult and probably not too helpful. The Social Security Administration "cannot guarantee that a new number will solve your problem." Indeed, you might lose access to your own records, or run into problems for having no credit history at all.

But, the final question we have to ask ourselves - is all this transparency really worth it? Regardless, don't pay for another credit report again - get it free instead, and write your senators and representatives and ask for some regulation in this area. They'll need all the support they can get, when Derek Smith, ChoicePoint's chairman is so well-connected to the Bush administration... and benefited from new homeland security initiatives for doing background checks identifying suspected terrorism suspects.

The most ironic part of that whole situation is that, with all those stolen identities, if terrorists laid their hands on the data, they'd be able to create new IDs that are essentially indistinguishable from anything a real issuing agency might produce - because the phony IDs would contain real, authenticated identity data. In my view, this is a massive vulnerability to homeland security... why ID people at airports anymore, when the real IDs could be counterfeit, right?

For that reason alone, I would argue, ChoicePoint's very existence, and that of the other mega data-warehouses of personal information, is an unacceptable risk to national security and therefore should be heavily regulated from the viewpoint of the damage they could cause.

How ya' like them apples?

Regardless of the homeland security angle, an ounce of prevention might've prevented all the cure that'll be required to put a stop to the fastest-growing crime in the country, having victimized almost 10 million Americans last year alone.

- Arik