The Raging Tech

What Information Do You Protect?

How often do you, in the course of your employment, come across personal data such as social security numbers, addresses, DOBs (date of birth), or financial records? In my line of work as a tech support analyst, we often look at personal data either because we need to identify someone before doing a password reset, or in the course of backing up someone’s data during a repair.

There’s a good rule of thumb for making sure you don’t fall victim to a lawsuit in the case of FERPA (financial and educational record privacy act) and HIPPA (health insurance privacy and portability act) violations, and that’s to make sure you don’t have any access to information you don’t need access to see, and don’t give any information to people who shouldn’t have it.

In the era of identity theft and privacy violations, government-run agencies and businesses alike are running scared and auditing left and right - and with good reason! These violations can cost not only huge fines to the entities found liable, but also the individual can be charged with civil and criminal charges and fined exorbitant amounts.

If you’re worried about such entities fumbling the ball with your personal information, you can sign up for something like life lock, who monitor your credit activities for suspicious events and remove you from junk mail lists, and also provide a guaranty against loss due to identity theft, all for a low monthly fee.

Lock Down Your Good Name & Credit

You’ve all seen the commercials on TV where the president of the lifelock company has his real social security number plastered all over the side of a semi truck riding around town, right? Supposedly this company claims their service is so good that they’re willing to risk a $1 million guarantee that no one will steal your identity.

What you may or may not have gotten from the commercial is that Life Lock will not only protect your identity, but it will also significantly reduce the amount of junk mail you get in your mailbox, reduce the number of credit card offers you get in the mail, and they will pro-actively try to protect you from identity theft.

The coolest part is, and I didn’t even know this, it’s only $10 a month. In this day and age, someone with the right amount of social engineering skills could sneak private information like your Social Security Number, address, date of birth, etc. and then pretend to be you until they had enough information to steal your identity and ruin your credit or even get you in trouble with the law.