by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Tuesday April 22, 2008 @01:01PM (#23160312)
Is it just me, or is it every week that some state has over 500k identities compromised?
We may as well have a ticker that says which state this week and how many.
We really need to find alternatives, otherwise by the end of the year, over half of the USA will have their identities somewhere underground...
Agreed. This is so common, and so problematic, that you might expect a law to be passed making it illegal to have more than (let's say) 4 identities' information including social security numbers on a storage device without (at least) trivial encryption measures in place. This really shouldn't be so hard for people.
Economists would call this a a classic "externalities" problem. It costs a company next to nothing to store vast amounts of data about you [reputation...erblog.com], but they don't pay the cost when your data gets spread around.
Right now, there's no reason why a company (or a state government) wouldn't keep as much data about you as it can. Hard drive space is all but free (especially relative to these types of transactional data) and big database engines can rapidly sort through the data when it's needed.
State-wide data theft (Score:2, Interesting)
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Right now, there's no reason why a company (or a state government) wouldn't keep as much data about you as it can. Hard drive space is all but free (especially relative to these types of transactional data) and big database engines can rapidly sort through the data when it's needed.
But, the problem is that
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