ID theft & online families

No surprise to anyone following tech news these days: On Diane Rehm's show on National Public Radio this week, Robert o'Harrow, Washington Post reporter and author of "No Place to Hide," said we're at a difficult intersection right now between incredible convenience and incredible vulnerability in terms of privacy. He was talking about the information on all of us that sits in businesses' computer databases, many of them connected to the Internet. The latest on this was the news this week that "information involving 1.4 million credit card and 96,000 check transactions" was stolen from computers at 108 DSW Shoe Warehouse stores, Reuters reported. The Associated Press added that the theft, which was 10 times greater than investigators originally estimated, "did not include home addresses or personal identification numbers." Earlier but recent personal data-theft reports involved other retailers and more famously LexisNexis and ChoicePoint, which, among other services, provide background checks on people.

How this relates to online families: working together to secure the personal info on our family PCs. Ideally, that involves family discussion about not ever sharing personally identifiable info (full name, address, school name, team name, phone no., etc.) in email, IM, blogs, Web sites, etc. For talking points, see this helpful primer on preventing ID theft at the Washington Post and Slate's "Has your identity been stolen?". One thing to keep in mind, as pointed out by Robert Douglas of PrivacyToday.com on NPR: The Internet is not the main problem with ID theft. Lost or stolen IDs like drivers' licenses, thieves riffling through trash, and lax business practices are bigger causes, he said. Teaching kids to protect their (and our) info online is just a good start as they develop critical thinking about what info they share online and offline.