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Big NYT article on many things Choicepoint
From: Richard Forno <rforno () infowarrior org>
Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2006 21:19:38 -0500
November 12, 2006 Keeping Your Enemies Close By GARY RIVLIN IF you found yourself running a company suddenly branded one of the most reviled in the country if, for example, you noticed that visitors to Consumerist.com, a heavily visited consumer Web site, voted yours as the second ³worst company in America² and you had just been awarded the 2005 ³Lifetime Menace Award² by the human rights group Privacy International you might feel obliged to take extraordinary steps. You might even want to reach out to your most vocal critics and ask them, ³What are we doing wrong?² So it was in early 2005 that Douglas C. Curling, the president of ChoicePoint, a giant data broker that maintains digital dossiers on nearly every adult in the United States, courted two critics whom he had accused just months earlier of starting ³yet another inaccurate, misdirected and misleading attack² on his company. Mr. Curling also contacted others who had spent years calling for laws requiring better safeguarding of personal information that ChoicePoint and other data brokers assemble records such as Social Security numbers, birth dates, driver¹s license numbers, license plate numbers, spouse names, maiden names, addresses, criminal records, civil judgments and the purchase price of every parcel of property a person has ever owned. ³It was sort of like when I talk with my wife when she¹s not happy with me,² Mr. Curling said of his dealings with some of ChoicePoint¹s harshest critics. ³It¹s not exactly a dialogue I look forward to, but I can¹t deny it¹s important.² He also could not deny his motivations for engaging in these conversations: in the public¹s mind, ChoicePoint had come to symbolize the cavalier manner in which corporations handled confidential data about consumers. In January, the Federal Trade Commission hit ChoicePoint with a $10 million fine, the largest civil penalty in the agency¹s history, for security and record-handling procedures that violated the rights of consumers. Under the settlement, it also required ChoicePoint to set aside an additional $5 million to help those suffering financial harm because of its failure to provide adequate safeguards against data breaches. < BIG SNIP > http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/business/yourmoney/12choice.html _______________________________________________ Dataloss Mailing List (dataloss () attrition org) http://attrition.org/dataloss Tracking more than 141 million compromised records in 469 incidents over 6 years.
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- Big NYT article on many things Choicepoint Richard Forno (Nov 11)