A recent Gartner survey of public opinion regarding identity theft revealed that many consumers, “half those polled, either weren’t aware they were entitled to a free credit report or considered them ‘not effective’ in fighting ID theft” (quoted from this MSNBC article). The article goes on to say that about one-third of those polled were “very concerned” about becoming ID theft victims themselves. Perhaps the clearest result from the survey - entitled “Increased Phishing and Online Attacks Cause Dip in Consumer Confidence” - is that the free credit reports are nowhere near enough protection for consumers against the increasing threat of identity theft.

Enter in new legislation from two U.S. Senators, which joins a slew of other proposed legislation aimed at tackling the ID theft epidemic. Senators Specter and Leahy have recently put forth their own bill, which would establish penalties for not disclosing data breaches nationwide, as well as limit the sales of SSNs and increase consumers’ abilities to access the information data brokers have on them. This Reuters article describes the bill in a bit more detail.

The sad fact is that this bill still leaves much of the responsibility for preventing identity theft in the hands of the individual consumer. While consumers would be granted the right to view and update their records at data brokers such as ChoicePoint, they would have to do so separately with each and every broker of their information. This means that the consumer has to both know and contact each and every organization peddling their information - a potentially onerous task. Furthermore, I can envision companies like ChoicePoint hiding behind this ‘right’ when they report what turns out to be erroneous information on an individual.

While the idea of jail time for irresponsible CEOs is always appealing, ultimately this legislation may not go far enough in protecting the consumer. Instead, it seems largely an effort to treat the symptoms, not the disease.

Further information on the proposed bill can also be found in this Information Week article.

This entry was posted by Paul Otto (pnotto@ncsu.edu) on Tuesday, June 28th, 2005 at 8:02 am and is filed under Legislation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Note: Blog posts are the opinions of their authors and do not reflect the official opinion of the National Science Foundation or North Carolina State University.