|
|
Society > Crime > Identity Theft > Identity Theft News > Online Records Fuel Identity Theft
Online Records Fuel Identity Theft
Submitted 2005-12-27 09:06:28 by psiolent
Rating: 0 (0 votes) | 725 Views
Section: Identity Theft News
The story of one Arizona county's struggles with identity theft reveals a much more widespread problem.
In the late 1990s, Maricopa county decided to take advantage of the forming information era and start posting public records online. This information included "land purchases, election information, tax information, divorce cases and much more." Their pioneering spirit also got them featured in the Smithsonian's National IT Innovation Collection.
Several years pass, and their efforts produce effects. Namely, Maricopa county now has the nation's highest rate of identity theft in the nation.
While other factors surely contributed to this state, the situation clearly reveals that identity theft will make us think long and hard about just what kinds of information will be publicly (and easily) available.
For Maricopa county it means pouring over a huge amount of documents and removing sensitive information from them. It also means modifying many levels of operation to create a system that is both easy to access and secure from identity theft.
While this affair has been fairly bad for Maricopa county, it is almost to be expected as our society goes through the growing pains and we mature into children of the information age. Not to wax philosophically, but an open information society is probably a good thing, and thankfully that seems to be where we are going. Identity theft is just one of many things we'll have to deal with as we go through the twists and turns of this transformation. Hopefully we'll come out the other side with a good idea of how to manage the vast amount of information that can now be available, as well as how to stifle negative aspects such as identity theft. |
Discuss this submission in the forum
|
|
|