A Ralph Nader for the 21st Century?
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/steffy/6666406.html
[...]
Hanni, who lives in California, is the founder of the Coalition for an
Airline Passengers Bill of Rights, the group that's spearheading efforts
in Congress to prevent airlines from imprisoning passengers on delayed
flights.In a lawsuit filed in Houston Tuesday, she claims that Delta Air
Lines was behind the hacking, accusing the world's largest carrier
of conspiracy and invasion of privacy.Hanni believes Delta wants to crush her attempts to force better
customer service on the airline industry, which has fought mightily
to ensure it can treat passengers shabbily.
Perhaps this isn't on the same scale as cars that are designed to explode and kill the passengers, but the model is the same. Can we see Hanni standing for the Presidency in a couple of decades? No, seriously, there does seem to be some skulduggery here that impacts privacy.
Irony
Headline: FTC attorney's laptops stolen
http://www.presstelegram.com/business/ci_3969575
The government agency charged with fighting identity theft said Thursday it had lost two government laptops containing sensitive personal data, the latest in a series of breaches encompassing millions of people.
Can you spell "Irony"?
This goes a bit beyond the bare-faced incompetence that we've grown used to
and come to treat as the new security baseline at the government.
And here's another chunk of Irony:
Many of the people whose data were compromised were being investigated for possible fraud and
identity theft, said Joel Winston, associate director of the FTC's Division of Privacy and Identity Theft Protection.
But what caught my attention in this article was the following:
On Thursday, a House panel was cautioned that credit monitoring alone may not be enough to protect Americans whose names, birth dates and Social Security numbers were compromised at the hands of the government.
During the House hearing Thursday, Mike Cook, a co-founder of a company specializing in data breaches, said identity-theft victims typically don't become aware they've been hurt until six months after their data was stolen, when creditors come calling for money owed.
At that point, it's likely the thieves will have moved on having made just a few purchases so they don't attract notice and started using another victim's information.
As a result, a credit monitoring service would raise a red flag after it was too late, Cook said.
So what's the real use of this credit monitoring that the companies are handing out in the aftermath of privacy failures if its not going to protect you? "Oh, you've had your bank account emptied, your house sold, and your wife has received a divorce notice. And by the way, your credit is non existent but that may be due compute hackers...."
Related articles
- Why Was Capital One Fined for Deceptive Credit Card Practices? (nationaldebtrelief.com)
- SC lawmakers to discuss extended credit monitoring (thestate.com)
- What To Do if You're a Victim of Identity Theft Tax Fraud (community.ally.com)
- Identity Theft: Keeping Safe in an Online World Infographic (veracode.com)
- Ways to Prevent Identity Theft [Infographic] (blogs.lawyers.com)
- Identity theft (themaurergroup.wordpress.com)
- How Important Identity Theft Prevention (howprotectmyid.wordpress.com)
- Tips to avoid becoming an identity theft victim (technology.inquirer.net)
