Identity Theft
Prevention Tips
(source: Federal Trade Commission)
Deposit your outgoing mail in post office
collection boxes or at your local post office,
rather than in an unsecured mailbox.
Don’t carry your SSN card; leave it in a
secure place.
Give your SSN only when absolutely
necessary, and ask to use other types of
identifiers. If your state uses your SSN
as your driver’s license number, ask to
substitute another number. Do the same if
your health insurance company uses your
SSN as your policy number.
Carry only the identification information and
the credit and debit cards that you’ll actually
need when you go out.
Keep your purse or wallet in a safe place
at work; do the same with copies of
administrative forms that have your sensitive
personal information.
When ordering new checks, pick them up
from the bank instead of having them mailed
to your home mailbox.
police station (if they haven’t
been arrested already) and file
an impersonation report. To
complete this report, the victim
must ask to have mug shots
taken and to be fingerprinted.
These prints and photos are
then compared with those of
the imposter. Their mug shot
and personal details are entered
on a police computer accessible
to officers 24 hours a day. Police
record and store their fingerprints and offer no assurances
that these records will ever be
removed. If exonerated, victims
should then request an official
clearance letter or certificate
of release and are expected
to carry this with them at all
times in case they are wrongly
arrested again. This process
represents a complete inversion of the usual processing of
victims and criminals. Unlike
criminals, however, victims are
expected to willingly subject
themselves to this documentary regime or risk being judged
as having failed to live up to the
new responsibilities associated
with their “victim identity.”
Victims and potential victims alike are expected to
transform the minutia of their
daily routines in light of informational risks. It is a project
that involves attending to the
flows, accuracy, and security of
the composite bits of documentary identities. For individual
citizens, this process aims to
foster a particular form of life
characterized by an ongoing
hyper vigilance about routines
for managing their data double.
The often mind-numbing minutia of the proliferating identity
theft risk-reduction strategies
often exceed the bounds of what
might be reasonably expected
from most citizens in managing a single risk. When all such
expectations fall on individual
citizens, it becomes highly
unlikely that all of these can be
effectively incorporated into a
person’s daily regimen.
This, in turn, accentuates
a larger political point about
how individuals are positioned
as the source of identity theft
risks. Such a characterization
effectively ignores the role of
institutions in creating the risk
of identity theft by systematically placing profit and organizational self-interests ahead of
any concerns about the public.
When information security has
been breached, policies often
preclude companies’ informing
customers of this fact out of a
fear of negative publicity and as
a way to save money. So, even
when credit card companies
know that the personal details
of thousands of their cardholders have been compromised,
they do not routinely issue
those customers new cards
because of the costs involved.
Instead, they subject the consumption patterns of those
suspect cards to still greater
electronic profiling, and cancel individual cards only when
there is evidence of fraudulent
use. This practice saves the
company the considerable cost
of having to mail out thousands
of new cards, but in the process
they effectively consign a subset
of cardholders to victimization.
The policies and practices
of credit agencies are most
responsible for the comparative
ease of identity theft. Take preapproved credit cards. While it
is common knowledge that identity thieves regularly steal and
use them, these costs—and the
attendant victimization of innocent citizens—are written off
as a cost of doing business. But
beyond the obvious risk of this
junk mail is something more
insidious. The credit industry is
fixated on being able to quickly
grant credit, and individual
agencies pride themselves on
being able to approve transactions in a few seconds. This
emphasis on speed consciously
sets aside questions about the
accuracy of information and
the security of transactions.
Businesses fear that if credit
purchases take too long to process, or if security measures are
too stringent, then legitimate
purchases will be rejected and
they will lose revenue. From
a business perspective, one of
