Word of an identity theft case got out after ChoicePoint sent warning letters last week to people in California. ChoicePoint said it discovered a security breach in October, when the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department began investigating one case of identity theft.
The task force leader, sheriff's lieutenant Robert Costa, said the number of people vulnerable to identity theft in the case could reach 500,000.
That's a much higher number than the latest estimate acknowledged by ChoicePoint, which belatedly sent warning letters to a total of 145,000 people in various states after a chorus of complaints. Outraged, attorney generals from 38 states demanded that ChoicePoint warn any victims in their states as well. California is the only state with a law requiring disclosure of such security breaches to people whose identities are threatened.
An Alpharetta, Ga.-based spinoff from the credit-reporting giant Equifax, ChoicePoint maintains databases that hold 19 billion Social Security numbers, credit and medical histories, motor vehicle registrations, job applications, lawsuits, criminal files, professional licenses and other pieces of sensitive information. ChoicePoint also owns a DNA analysis lab and facilitates drug testing for employers.
But ChoicePoint and other privately owned aggregators of personal information operate with virtually no federal oversight, and critics say the companies haven't done enough to safeguard their information-rich databases.
"There's a serious problem that we as a nation don't seem to grasp — that the public is at risk whenever organizations collect massive amounts of information about us and they don't take extraordinary precautions to ensure that that information is protected," said Dr. Larry Ponemon, who runs a research firm in Tucson, dedicated to privacy management in business and government. "People ought to be standing in lines protesting this."
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