Personal Info of 3.5 Million Texans Was Publicly Accessible 146
SpaceGhost writes "The Houston Chronicle reports, 'Personal information of about 3.5 million Texans — including names, mailing addresses and Social Security numbers — was posted on a publicly accessible server at the state comptroller's office, much of it for more than a year.' Many of the records were for retired teachers and the unemployed, and they sometimes included DOB and drivers license numbers."
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
All it takes is a simple law and this shit could stop next week.
Yep, because laws stop people from doing stupid and illegal things.
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Forbidding the collection of SSNs isn't really the answer. The banking industry will just devise some other unique key that people will need to provide so that credit checks and such can be run, and then that key will become the center of risk.
The real answer is to make this information worthless by requiring banks to actually follow up and ensure that a new credit line requestor is the person they claim to be before opening the new credit line. Currently, the banks do everything they can to prevent themselves from eating the loss, but they don't do much to prevent the loss in the first place. They push as much as possible onto merchants and individual consumers. It's worth more to them to open instant credit lines virtually anonymously than to eat the occasional loss, and until that changes, the rest of us will continue to suffer from financial predation by third-world organized criminals.
Re:So? (Score:4, Insightful)
The banking industry will just devise some other unique key...
Yeah... That's the idea. The bank, insurance, and other industries and departments are supposed to use their own unique to them ID system. Now a thief would need to break into all those different databases. IT is up to all of us to resist allowing them to use the SSN. Just say no.. The law doesn't prohibit that.
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
The only predation by third-world organized criminals that occurs directly against the end user consists of 419 scams. The rest of it consists of various sorts of bank fraud that the banks aren't sufficiently motivated to take measures against; but are willing to put those whose names are used through the wringer.
It's very clever, really: "Identity theft" makes it your problem. Admitting that it is "bank fraud" would make it their problem.
Re:unemployed (Score:2, Insightful)
Why the distinction? Because there are millions of "not working" people who the government chooses to exclude from the unemployment lists to help keep the appearance of unemployment low.
Re:Phew! (Score:4, Insightful)