Carleton University | jwhitson@connect.carleton.ca
Several recent high-profile incidents have thrust identity theft into the media spotlight. The first to gain notoriety involved the credit-verification company ChoicePoint, which in 2004 inadvertently delivered electronic files containing the names, addresses, social security numbers, and credit reports for almost 140,000 people to identity thieves in the Los Angeles area. In 2007 the British government lost computer disks that contained the personal details of every family in the country. In both cases, the media and authorities articulated a series of anxieties about how this data could be exploited. A plethora of security experts quickly emerged to offer citizens concrete advice on how to mitigate the risk of identity theft, including tips on both prevention and on what to do if victimized. These tips, the rationale behind them, and their implications have provided considerable fodder for this article. Every year there are similar stories of corporations losing customers’ personal information, and while citizens are repeatedly told to protect themselves, the parties responsible—both the companies that lost the data and the thieves themselves—are often unscathed.
Although there are different definitions of identity theft, the crime typically involves illegally using someone else’s personal information to secure some benefit. Thieves acquire such information through various sources and means, including customer service representatives, hacking and data-mining programs, “dumpster diving” for personal documents, and stealing computers. Victimization ranges from single-instance fraud to more elaborate, extended uses of a person’s identity. And while estimates of the extent and cost of identity theft differ, it is commonly recognized as the most rapidly escalating form of crime in both North America and the United Kingdom.
The rise in identity theft parallels the rise of bureaucratic identity markers such as driver’s licenses, credit cards, and passports. The shift to an information economy means that people interact with each other at a distance. Over the phone, on the Internet, through the mail, people use these markers to verify their identity and their trustworthiness. As they go about their daily lives, they actively invoke or unknowingly draw upon a host of markers, in the process producing yet more
information about their behaviors that institutions store, analyze, and sell. Making a purchase with a debit card, opening a door with a swipe card, telephoning a friend, requesting a travel visa, driving on electronic toll roads—an expanding range of activities leaves informational traces that cumulatively compose a dispersed and loosely coordinated network of information that can be drawn together in particular configurations to produce detailed profiles of a person’s behavior, health, travels, consumption patterns, and so on. These profiles are commonly referred to as “data doubles [ 1].” They are the lifeblood of new forms of informational capitalism and e-governance, and are used to ascertain a person’s trustworthiness and value as a customer, as well as to streamline services and improve corporations’ daily operations. Data doubles are also a prime target for identity thieves. Institutions anxious about the risks inherent in data doubles falling into the wrong hands are now championing assorted projects of personal information management designed to reduce the prospect of identity theft.
Several initiatives have been established to counter iden-
[ 1] Haggerty, Kevin D. and Richard V. Ericson. “The Surveillant Assemblage.” British Journal of Sociology, 51 (2000): 605-622.
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