Denialism.com

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Banks Must Come Clean on ID Theft

In my day job, I'm fighting denialism from the banking industry. I have a hypothesis on so called "new account" identity theft: it occurs largely because of lax authentication practices, and much of it could be curbed with sensible changes in business practices. My evidence for this is in two papers--Putting Identity Theft on Ice: Freezing Credit Reports to Prevent Lending to Impostors and Identity Theft: Making the Known Unknowns Known.

The banking industry deflects attention to its authentication practices by blaming the victim. As I have explained elsewhere, they sponsor polls and interpret the results to make it look like identity theft is "closely connected to the victim." If it's connected to the victim, it's the victim's fault for not protecting their data. And there are real stretches made to show a connection. For instance, if someone at your workplace steals your identity, Javelin Research considers the crime to be closely connected to you. For those of us who work at large employers like the University of California, this is preposterous.

Anyway, I have an oped in today's Chronicle explaining the need for public reporting of statistical data on identity theft. If we had real data, we could get beyond the silly public relations fodder from the industry. We could put the industry's denialist tactics to the test!

2 Comments:

Ted said...

The question goes back to "Who owns consumer data"? This is poorly thought out in a globalized society, and as usual, the government sided against the consumer. My data gets sold routinely, and any jackoff can get access to my financial data through databrokers.

The government is sorely lacking in PK encryption technologies that support digital commerce or allowing us (consumers) to have rights on this. It should be mandated, and the costs subsidized through corporate taxation. Unfortunately, the constitution and bill of rights do not address digital commerce, so we're f*cked.

Will this happen? When pigs fly, or maybe after the terrorists bring down the financial systems effecting the overclass directly.

Then we'll run around with our hair on fire.

April 17, 2007 11:41 AM,

Mark said...

Congratulations on the article.

For the most part, these surveys are flawed because new forms of identity theft have evolved that cannot be detected by public polling.

Like I said yesterday, polling can give you accurate information when you ask people questions about themselves. It's idiotic to ask them questions about things they nothing about, or think that has anything to do with the real world. Neat little selective data trick though.

April 17, 2007 11:49 AM,

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