Released: July 13, 2006

Privacy expert urges free credit monitoring

Source: By Robert Gellman, DM News

The privacy crisis of the moment results from the outbreak of security breaches that has been a growing plague for the past two years. To review a list of recent breaches, visit the Web site of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

That list begins with the ChoicePoint breach of February 2005 and continues through the Department of Veterans Affairs breach from May of this year. The ChoicePoint breach of 145,000 names is now a mere blip compared with the VA’s 28 million-name breach.

The Clearinghouse reports that the records of 85 million people have been exposed by security breaches. That’s more than 25 percent of the U.S. population. The actual number is higher — perhaps much higher — because no numbers are associated with many of the reported breaches.

There were security breaches before ChoicePoint, and there surely have been other breaches not announced or even known to data controllers. If we could put a number on all breaches and limited the population to people older than 12, we likely would find that records on well over half of the U.S. population have been the subject of security breaches.

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