Information about protecting yourself from identity theft.

Privacy Concerns and Identity Theft

In today’s highly advanced age of technological, privacy sometimes is hard to maintain.

In July of 2000, there was a public uproar over the publicized issues that ToySmart.com database was being sold as an asset in its bankruptcy, this after it had promised the information would never be sold. Toysmart had collected personal information from those who'd visited its site such as name, address, billing information, shopping preferences, family profiles, including the names and birthdates of children and had promised this information would never be sold to third parties. Unfortunately, this demonstrated how vital information about you and your family could be sold, and obtained by those on the black-market, hacked from multiplicity of sources or simply stored for access by the federal government.

Needless to say, that information, in today’s world has value to marketing consultants, health and life insurance companies, credit companies, and criminals. In fact, our personal information translates into profit. This profit means that our personal information is susceptible to theft, graft, bribes, and criminal abuses. Our personal information is as precious as gold and just as we protect our nations gold source in Fort Knox we need just as a secure area to protect our personal information.

In 2000, lawsuits were brought against DoubleClick because of their practice of using Cookies to track and then sale individuals’ information. In 2003, another lawsuit was brought against the company for again collecting personal information. DoubleClick is not the only company collecting information, other companies have been operating in the same way without public outcry simply because these companies are doing so quietly without our knowing that our personal information is be collected.

It is not so much “Big Brother watching us” as the government, criminals, telemarketers, and unsavory data warehousing software developers, who all of a sudden desire to know our personal information such as our buying habits, to the books we’ve recently read, our family history, and all of our financial information. You need to keep this information secure and out of their hands.

One way for us to do this is through common sense, by not giving out this information on silly applications, censuses or data forms that companies request us to fill out. If I need a product or information bad enough, I can always find it somewhere else where I do not have do divulge my personal information in order to obtain what I need, even if this means paying a higher price. After all, what is the price of privacy?

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