| Privacy Is Good Business |
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I believe that it is "good business" for American companies to be more responsive to customer and employee privacy concerns. After all, when a company succeeds in creating a trusted relationship, many customers do, in fact, appreciate the personalization of marketing messages that making their personal data available can enable and are therefore willing to share more information about their purchasing habits and lifestyle.
One of the lessons learned from recently publicized data breaches is that the failure to properly secure personal information can be very costly in terms of lawsuits, fines, diminished reputation and customer churn. Hence, it is always a good idea for companies to be honest and open with people whose data has been entrusted to them. That means posting privacy policies that are easy to understand. Remember, not everyone has a law degree. Transparency also requires the company to explain clearly how personal information is being used and why it may be shared
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| ChoicePoint Gets a Makeover |
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The company is most widely known for its inadverent sale of thousands of individuals' data records to a ring of Nigerian identity thieves in 2005, and for triggering an avalanche of media coverage of data breaches, identity theft, and online fraud.
The company paid $15 million for its trouble, and since that time, has implemented a series of steps it hopes will improve security. It's also placed restrictions on the types of records it sells, and has moved away from contracts with government and law enforcement agencies, which has cost it millions in revenue.
ChoicePoint's humbling at the hands of Nigerian data thieves and the drubbing handed to them by the press and public has pushed them to pay much more attention to consumer concerns and data security needs, instead of focusing solely on client and shareholder desires.
But there is still something of a laissez faire attitude towards the reams of data the company collects, repurposes, and resells. As long as that's the case, their work can do as much damage as good.
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| Pretexting for your phone records |
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Under this practice, the data broker contacts the telephone company and seeks a subscriber's phone records by pretending to be the subscriber. By having a few details (phone number, Social Security number, date of birth), data brokers can collect this information with an alarmingly high rate of success.
Phner records provide a “telecommunications fingerprint” that can point to accomplices, undo alibis and even, in the case of mobile service, provide information about a suspect's location at a given time. It also can come in handy in a divorce trial, and this use, along with many others, is the source of the recent spate of legislative action.
Of course, no industry can survive without customers. And for data brokers who deal in telephone records, these customers need to be of the “no questions asked” variety. According to experts in the field, the vast majority of telephone records are purchased by attorneys, private investigators, skip tracers, debt collectors and the news media. One of the more dramatic uses for such information is to prove infidelity in a divorce case, but phone records are used mainly to track people for debt collection and pursuant to a private investigation.
Section 222 of Title 47 of the U.S. Code puts the responsibility for maintaining the confidentiality of telephone records squarely on the telephone carriers. The new laws, however, create criminal and civil penalties for individuals who fraudulently gain access to the records.
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